A Million Suns
by normalasyou
Summary: In a mid-2030s world torn by corruption and meaningless violence, the Beatles have suddenly been erased from the world's memory.. except for Jean Carlisle, who runs into Paul McCartney on her first day of college and recognizes him. Now she must reintroduce the Beatles to one another and to the world, all in the midst of a growing worldwide revolution against hatred and bigotry.
1. Chapter 1

_Hi! As a warning, there are some characters in this story who are very racist/homophobic/ignorant, and some of this comes out in the first chapter. This takes place in a time in which many extreme and ill-advised pieces of legislation have been passed and many more are under consideration, and this_ _is not an accurate reflection of but rather (at most) a negative exaggeration and projection of our current political state. Any offensive rhetoric does not reflect my own personal views._

 _Also, I haven't got anyone's permission to use them as a character, but there are a lot of real-life people featured as characters_ _in this story anyway._

 _Enjoy! -Laura_

The boy looked a lot like Paul McCartney from behind.

Really young Paul McCartney, though. Pre-Quarrymen, even. The gauntness wasn't quite there yet, let alone the pronounced cheeks and overgrown hair. Jean knew comparing the boy sitting two rows in front of her to late-1950s McCartney probably wasn't the most productive way to spend her first Intro to World Politics class, but his hair was just the right amount of thick and dark, and besides, it was syllabus week. Even his beige jacket looked like it had come straight out of England.

No one else in here looked quite as interesting. There were a couple of girls with dyed hair, but that was hardly out of style nowadays. A girl with a vintage red _Make America Great Again_ tee shirt, and a guy with the same phrase tattooed on his upper bicep. But then again, that was hardly out of style these days, either.

"All I'm saying," the guy next to him was going, leaned over his desk with both arms bent in their stoner sweatshirt sleeves, "is we're all agreed Arabs are dangerous, right? They already stopped letting them in. Everyone in Congress voted for it. You think that many people can be wrong?"

 _Jesus_ , thought Jean. She wanted to hear what the other boy was going to say – wanted him to turn his head, at least, so that she could get a better look at his face – but her own partner was staring at her.

"Jean?"

She shook her head, turning back around. They were supposed to talk in pairs for a minute; there was a debate going on in Congress about forcibly banning Islam in America, and the professor, a thin fifty-something-year-old woman with a short pixie cut of hair that could only be described as prickly, wanted to know their thoughts. "Yeah?"

The girl sitting next to her also had a pixie cut, and it was a strange lavender color, somewhere light and fluffy that landed in between purple and pink. Her name was Agnes. "I was saying how I'm against it. The whole banning-a-religion thing. It's unconstitutional."

Jean managed a smile. Thank God, somebody who made sense. "Don't tell me you're a fundamentalist."

"I am in this case," she said stubbornly. "There's a lot of crap in the Constitution, sure, but freedom of religion is in there for a reason."

Jean had definitely sat down in the right area of the lecture hall. It was a popular class, and apart from a series of scattered loners (including herself, honestly), the room was sprinkled left and right with gaggles of conservative-looking preps. Guys with fratty crewnecks, girls with portable Starbucks mugs and stickered laptops. Jean didn't consider herself a very judgmental person, but she knew judgmental people when she saw them.

Here, though, she was sitting next to a nice girl named Agnes with pink hair. And speaking of views, she had a Paul McCartney lookalike to keep her boredom at bay.

"All right, come on back," called the professor – Mickey, as she had told them all to call her – gesturing for them all to quiet down. "What did you all come up with?"

A few hands went up, one of which belonged to the boy with the red cap a couple of rows in front of Jean. Mickey paced around for a few minutes, surveying the sea of hands, and then called on him.

"Say your name first," she added, "I want to try to learn everyone's."

"Silas Faring. And I was just saying about how I feel like it's basically common sense at this point," he said. He had a thick voice, smooth, but some sort of hidden edge in the tone made it hard for Jean to listen to. "Like, obviously we all want equality, that's not what I mean - but after 9/11 and the riots last year in Michigan, we've got to be thinking in terms of what's viable."

Agnes groaned and sank a little lower down in her chair. "Fucking Silas," she muttered.

Jean looked over at her. "You know him?"

"He's my half-brother."

"And what is viable, Mr. Faring?" Mickey asked him. "In your opinion, I mean."

"Kicking them out," said Silas. "All of them. It's not their country anyway. I mean, I know nobody wants to say it, and I get that, but it's just the best option at this point. We need to think about our safety first."

"Jesus," Jean muttered. She looked over, but Agnes said nothing; she was glaring at Silas from behind.

Mickey made a little humming noise, to indicate she understood him. Her lips were very tight. "That does seem to be a popular opinion these days," she said. "What about your partner? What did you think?" she asked, addressing the other boy now directly. "Remember, say your name first."

The boy sat forward.

"Uh, my name's Paul," he said, and Jean felt her heart nearly stop.

His voice.

It was Liverpool, through and through - and the funny thing was that she wouldn't have even known Liverpool if she hadn't known _that voice_. It wasn't just British, it was Paul McCartney British - the same lilting quality, the same deep curves around the words.

And his name was Paul.

She whipped her head around to look at Agnes again. Agnes had been looking ahead at Paul, who was speaking - what he was saying, Jean couldn't have said, she was no longer taking in anything but the accent - but when she saw Jean turn around, she glanced back at her.

"What?" she whispered.

"Do you not see it?" Jean knew her voice came out sounding high-strung, but she didn't care. "Or _hear_ it?"

"Hear what?" Agnes was smiling, still, but she looked confused.

"Jesus, look at him. It's-" She stopped, because the words sounded so crazy, but then said them anyway, in a low whisper. "It's Paul McCartney."

Agnes blinked, staring at her. The confusion was still there.

"I know it sounds crazy," said Jean, "but—"

"Who's Paul McCartney?"

Jean stopped. "What?"

Her first instinct was that the other girl was playing a trick on her, but Agnes looked perfectly genuine - still a little confused, only mildly interested.

"Paul McCartney?" Agnes repeated. "Who's that?"

Jean felt her mouth hanging open just a little, and she closed it, to feel less stupid. Then she said, "You're kidding, right?"

"Why would I be kidding? Is he an actor or something?"

"No. Well, yeah, I guess a little bit, but - you honestly don't know who he is?"

Agnes shrugged.

Jean knew Agnes was waiting for her to explain, but she looked around the room, watching the faces of the other people in the lecture hall. Nobody else seemed at all surprised - a few people were texting under their chairs or staring into space, and some were watching Paul or raising their own hands in response, but nobody was wide-eyed or pale or jumping up and down. Even Mickey seemed awfully at ease.

"What the _fuck_ ," she whispered.

Agnes elbowed her. " _What?_ "

"Paul McCartney, the musician," she said, turning again to face Agnes. A sudden new urgency had taken hold of her, and she could hear it in her own voice, and she didn't know why. "The Beatles. You've never heard of the Beatles?"

"I've heard of beetles. Lower your voice a little."

Jean shook her head. She could think of nothing more to say, and she could tell Agnes was barely listening anymore anyway; Mickey had called on somebody else now, and the discussion was moving on.

She kept watching Paul – it was hard to keep her eyes off of him, more out of perplexity than anything else. He turned his head to the side a couple of times, to glance around or to reach down for his backpack, and these brief instances confirmed everything, cementing the idea even further into her mind. He had the exact same rounded eyes and arched brows, the same curved nose, the same small lips. And he looked very young, maybe even a little younger than her, and she was a freshman.

For anyone to not know Paul McCartney when they saw him – any _single person_ , let alone a lecture hall full of people – was ludicrous. Jean had grown up on him. Him and all the Beatles – she had never had a particular favorite, but her moms would have little debates over their own (Paul and Ringo), they'd play _Hard Day's Night_ and _Sgt. Pepper_ on shuffle while they cooked, they'd even given Jean a tee shirt once from a concert they had gone to together as teenagers in the late nineties. It was one of their first dates. Everybody knew the Beatles – they were referenced constantly in movies and interviews, in everyday conversations, their songs were played all the time on the radio. Paul McCartney – at least, the only one she had known of until now – had died before she was born, but she had heard stories and seen the footage of the national memorial, the concert Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison had put together in his honor, just a few years before they too had passed away. She'd seen photographs of the streets after the death of John Lennon. She had never been obsessed with them or anything, but they cropped up in life in so many forms and at so many times, the way all important things did. They were worldwide.

Maybe she was hallucinating. Maybe it was somebody who just looked and sounded very similar to Paul McCartney, or maybe there was nobody there at all, maybe she just hadn't had quite enough coffee this morning and now she was starting to drift into some daydream…

But every time she thought this, he would turn his head or raise his hand to say something new, and her doubts would dissolve all over again.

She spent most of the lecture glancing down at the clock on her phone every few minutes, waiting for Professor Mickey to dismiss them so that she could go and talk to Paul, to see if it was really him. She missed a lot of the rest of the discussion, except to note that Silas Faring raised his hand a couple more times, and each time he seemed to have something to say to make Agnes' cheeks redden even further – whether from embarrassment or from anger, Jean wasn't quite sure.

But when the lecture did come to an end, she felt frozen. She scrambled all of her things together and then sat still in her seat, watching helplessly as Paul gathered up his things and started making his way over to the aisle, grinning at a couple of people on the way as he passed them. He was so close.

It was less to do with the fact that it was him, and more a matter of not wanting to be wrong. The only thing more ridiculous than a room of people not recognizing a famous musician was the idea of a famous musician's resurrection from the dead in the form of his own once-teenaged self. She knew she was wrong – there had to be some rational explanation, some reason to explain that she was wrong – and she didn't want to be that girl who freaked out some guy for no reason the first week of her freshman year.

And yet. She had to know.

She took a deep breath, made her way down the row – and was stopped in the middle of the aisle by Professor Mickey.

"Hello," said Mickey.

She sounded – and looked – friendly, but Jean felt immediately anxious. _She saw me glancing at the clock, she knew I wanted class to be over._

"Hello," said Jean. Behind Mickey's shoulder, Paul was lingering near the door of the lecture hall, chatting with a couple of other guys.

"I'm Mickey," said the professor, "and you are?"

"Jean Carlisle. I'm a freshman."

"Well, welcome." Mickey smiled. "As I pointed out a couple of times, I make it a point to learn everybody's names, and I just thought I'd come over and introduce myself since I don't think you really said anything during class."

"Right," said Jean. It was true, she hadn't raised her hand once. "Sorry. I usually talk more, I was a little distracted."

"Oh?"

She hesitated. Paul was about to leave the room – and yet, wait. Here was an authority figure, and better yet, an adult. Mickey looked like she was in her fifties – that was even a little older than Jean's parents, and they had both been alive at the same time as the Beatles. Mickey seemed friendly enough, and genuine, and she was a professor, which meant she had to be smart and cultured. What better way for her to check?

"Well," said Jean cautiously, "you know the boy – he was sitting a couple of rows in front of me? Next to the 'Make America Great Again' guy?"

"Ahh." Mickey grinned knowingly, lifting a finger. "Say no more."

Jean exhaled in relief. _She knows._ Thank God, she wasn't crazy.

"All I ask," said Mickey, "is that you flirt on your own time and not while I'm talking. Sound good?"

It took a moment for Jean to realize what she meant. "Oh – what? No," she said hurriedly, "I didn't mean – not like that. No flirting. It was – it was just, didn't he look like Paul McCartney to you? Like, a lot? It was uncanny."

Mickey stared at her for a moment, then shrugged a little and shook her head in apology. "I can't say I know the name," she said. "I'm not exactly up to date on all the teen heartthrobs these days."

 _Not these days_ , Jean couldn't help but think. _He was a teen heartthrob, like, seventy years ago._

"You've never heard of him?" she pressed, trying hard not to sound frantic. "From the Beatles?"

"Is that a band?"

Jean shook her head. Behind Mickey, Paul was leaving the classroom, disappearing into the crowd of students milling around in the hallway.

"I have to go," Jean managed, "I'm sorry."

And without waiting for Professor Mickey to reply, she hurried past her, down the aisle, and out of the lecture hall. She didn't look back.

She was worried for a moment that she'd lost him, but there he was, several paces ahead of her, in the hallway outside the door. His friends had left him and he was walking more slowly now, reading the club posters and ads on the walls as he went.

"Paul?" He didn't hear her at first, so she swallowed to clear her voice a little and said it again. "Paul?"

He turned around. Now she got her first look at his face head-on, his whole self, and she felt a chill run down her spine. He was wearing a plain grey sweater, not a suit or anything like what the Beatles had worn in their early days, but his face – it was like looking into a living photograph. She felt cold.

"Yeah?" he said. He stepped off to one side so that the flood of people leaving the classroom could pass them by, and she followed suit.

"Sorry, it's just–" She could feel herself blushing. "I know it's kind of stupid," she said, "but you look so much like Paul McCartney."

He blinked.

She wasn't sure what to say. "It's nothing," she said quickly, "I don't–"

"I am Paul McCartney," he said plainly.

Something coursed through her, something not as clear-cut as fear, but not far away from it, either.

 _I am Paul McCartney._ She could think of nothing to say.

He was doing something in between a smile and a frown – it was like a smile, really, only his eyebrows were knitted together in confusion. "Do I know you?" he asked.

"Sorry," she said again, "I just–" She closed her eyes, shook her head, and opened them again. " _The_ Paul McCartney, I mean," she said, looking straight into his eyes, pronouncing every word with extra meaning. "Like from Liverpool."

His face brightened. "I am from Liverpool! How did you know I'm from Liverpool? Are you from England?"

"Of course not."

"Sorry," he said flippantly, "it's just that I don't meet a lot of Americans who've even heard of it."

"Everybody's heard of Liverpool," she insisted. "Because of _you_ , because of–"

She stopped, midsentence, at the look on his face. It was the same look of confusion he'd been wearing for the entire conversation, but only now for some reason did it register with her.

He didn't know, either.

Nobody in her world politics class knew who Paul McCartney was. And neither did Paul McCartney himself.

"Listen," she said, starting over, "can I talk to you?"

He blinked. "What, now?"

"Anytime." The phrase _any time at all_ popped into her head, and she shook it away, annoyed with herself. "Yes. Now."

"I've got a class starting."

"What class?"

He was smiling just a little bit – less at the conversation itself, it seemed, and more, a little, at her. "History of popular music."

"Jesus Christ," she said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Can you meet me after?"

"Where? And why?" he added, almost as an afterthought.

"It's a lot to explain," she said helplessly. "Can you meet me at Pence Library at five? I'll put my number in your phone."

A grin broke across his face. She couldn't remember when he had last broken eye contact with her. "I don't even know your name," he said.

She exhaled. _This isn't happening._ "It's Jean," she answered. "Jean Carlisle."

She hadn't noticed him taking out his phone, but he must have, because he handed it to her now. She thought about scrolling through his contacts to see if there were any other famous names she would recognize, but he was watching her, and she thought better of it. He waited patiently while she entered her number, then took the phone back and pocketed it.

"All right, Jean Carlisle," he said, smiling that awful old painkiller smile. "I'll see you at five."

She had a couple of hours to kill before five, so she left the hall and started to wander. Her sister, Mae, had made this huge deal out of exploring back when she had gone to her first year of college, and she was trying to push the same habits onto Jean now – "Jean, I know it's not your thing," she had told her, "but you'll be surprised how much fun it is, finding all the best little study spots and coffee shops. Meeting new people in random ways." But she was right, exploring wasn't Jean's thing, so instead she found an empty bench on the square and pulled out her phone.

The square wasn't really a square of streets or even a central part of the town itself, but rather a great lawn in the middle of campus filled with crisscrossing sidewalks, benches, and trees people used for hammocking. All of the surrounding halls were visible, but it was still big enough that once you found a place to sit by yourself, you didn't really have to worry too much about being bothered.

She dialed Cassie's number first. Of her two moms, Cassie was the more adamant Beatles fan, not to mention the more likely to pick up in the middle of a workday.

She answered on the sixth ring, just when Jean was starting to think about hanging up.

"Jean!" She sounded flustered, but then again, she always did.

"Hi, Mom."

"I didn't think I'd be hearing from you so soon after we dropped you off."

"What little faith you have in me," said Jean, smiling.

"Oh, come on, you know what I mean." Her voice was cutting in and out a little bit, and there was a roaring in the background, some loud and continuous sound that fell somewhere between thrumming and thrashing.

"Mom, what's that noise? Where are you?"

"Oh, is it interfering? Sorry, it's the rain. I'm painting the house."

Jean failed to see the connection between the two sentences. "Are the windows open?"

"And all the doors. I want the rain-smell to settle in with the paint while it's drying. I know it's silly and not realistic, not actually, but it's a fun thought – and it'll help me believe there's a little more nature in the house. If I think it, it's so, right? The placebo effect."

"The placebo effect," Jean agreed.

"Anyway, kid," Cassie went on, her voice still coming and going in patches, "how was your first day?"

"It's still going on. But it's good. Um–" She stopped, suddenly cautious.

"What, Jean?"

"Nothing. But I thought you'd think it's funny – there's a guy in my world politics class who looks just like Paul McCartney."

She realized halfway through saying it that she didn't really expect anything. Not anymore, not at this point. Calling her mom was a last-ditch effort, the final test this strange dream had to pass before she gave in to it, and of course it _was_ going to pass. Of course it was.

"Paul who?" asked Cassie.

"Indie actor," said Jean dully. "You wouldn't know him."

"Huh. Hey, have you talked to Mae recently?"

Her heart was sinking; she was barely even in the conversation anymore. "Not since I got here. She sent me some pictures of D.C. last week, though."

Mae had graduated from college that spring, and about a month ago she had taken an entry-level job at an incumbent Senator's reelection campaign in D.C. She was far more into government and politics than Jean herself would probably ever be – Jean was only taking one politics class, after all, and even that was only so that she could fulfill a requirement. But Mae was all about it – she had posters of her favorite politicians all over her walls at home, and she had been coming up with mathematical ways to calculate likely race outcomes for at least the past ten years.

"Yeah, I got those too," said Cassie. "She's really gonna kick some ass there, I bet."

"Yeah," said Jean quietly. Mae always did.

"Hey, you too, okay? Kick ass this year."

"More so than other years?"

"If you kick as much ass as you usually do, you should be fine." She was smiling, Jean could hear it in her voice, even with the storm blurring in around the edges of her words. "I gotta go, though, Jean, before I get paint all over the phone."

"You haven't already?"

"Well, that goes without saying," Cassie said confidentially, "but any more and Dana's gonna kick _my_ ass. I love you, kid."

"I love you, too."

Once she had hung up and put her phone away, the world felt quiet. She still had another hour before five and she didn't have any real homework to do yet, this being syllabus week, and she certainly wasn't going to use her time and energy wandering all around and getting lost somewhere else on campus, so she decided to go ahead to the library. If nothing else, she could find a table and mess around on the Internet for a while before Paul showed up.

 _The Internet_.

She started to walk faster. How had she not thought of that before? Forget Cassie, the Internet was the final test now, the ultimate place she could check. Right now, everyone else was crazy. But if the Internet agreed with them, then maybe the crazy one was really Jean.

She made it across the square and past a few more buildings, then trotted up the stone steps of Pence Library. She heaved open one massive double door, felt the warm outside air cede to air conditioning as she wandered past a modest café and information desk, and began combing through rows of desks and shelves in the main hall.

The library was mostly empty, it being only the first week of classes. There were lanes and lanes of long tables and pillars with outlets for charging, magazine shelves, computer pods and walled-in classrooms, reading rooms, microprint rooms, folio rooms. The main area was too open, so she kept walking further into the shelves until she had found a free table in the nonfiction section, not far from some windows overlooking State Street and some more of downtown. She slung her backpack off and onto the floor and pulled out her laptop.

 _The beatles_ , she typed first. Several results came up, all having to do with insects. Classifications and diagrams, extermination companies and pesticides.

 _Paul mccartney_ , she tried. Nothing. _George harrison. John lennon. Ringo starr._

She gave up and sat back. Absolutely nothing. Bullshit results – random people's social media accounts, other famous Johns and Georges.

 _That settles it_ , she thought. _Either I've gone nuts, or the world has completely forgotten about the Beatles._

Or she was dreaming. That could be it, she reasoned – a very bizarre and unusually long and lucid dream.

Feeling like an idiot, she tried pinching herself a couple of times. She had never pinched herself before in her life, but she was desperate, and there was no better time to try. She supposed she could try thinking about other things, but there was nothing else to think about…this was ridiculous, this was _impossible_ , and she couldn't stop thinking about it until it made sense.

Maybe if she took a nap. If this was a dream, maybe a nap would wake her up in real life, and if this was real life, it would at least help to clear her head a little, prompt her to think more rationally. She shut her laptop, brought her backpack up onto the desk as a pillow, leaned down into the lumpy fabric, and closed her eyes.

She could probably use the extra sleep anyway – she hadn't gone out much during welcome week, but her roommate, Erica, had gone partying almost every night, and even though they were practically strangers Jean still felt bad somehow about going to sleep before she got back. She had shared a room with Mae growing up, and some of her old feelings and habits must have stuck with her, because going to sleep with a noted absence in the room just didn't feel right for some reason. Around three a.m. was Jean's cutoff – she would text Erica, _good?_ , and if Erica replied, she would go to sleep. If she didn't, Jean would stay up until she did. Last night she had been up until around two-thirty, surfing course catalogues and watching _Fawlty Towers_ online…come to think of it, she _did_ feel pretty drowsy…

"Jean?"

Her head jerked up from the table.

Paul was there, grinning that same stupid grin he'd been grinning when she had seen him before. Of course, she had forgotten – Paul was _the charming one_ , wasn't that right? Every teenage girl's favorite Beatle. Now, goddammit, she could kind of see why.

"Hi," she said.

"Kind of an old-fashioned name," he said, sitting down across from her. It felt weird being across the table from him, like they were about to conduct some sort of business transaction. He set his backpack down on the floor.

"My sister's name is Mae with an 'e,'" said Jean, "so it could be worse."

"It's not a bad thing. I like Mae with an 'e.' And Jean," he added quickly. "Your parents must be old-fashioned people."

Jean shrugged. She considered her parents more retro than old-fashioned – they weren't at all nostalgic for anytime before the twenty-first century, but she did often hear them talk fondly of the time she'd been born, back when it was still legal in most states for women to live together as romantic partners. Before they'd had to hide, to introduce one another to their neighbors as roommates. By now, certainly, it did seem old-fashioned.

"In some ways," she said levelly, "I guess they are."

He was smiling so much. It seemed so natural, so easy, for him to be friendly – to be casual. She wished she could feel more like that.

"So," he said, "are you going to explain what it is about me that freaks you out so much?"

"I'm not freaked out." Which was stupid, because yes, of course she was.

"Yes, you are," he said.

"Okay, but I've got a good reason to be. Listen," she said. "I'm not really sure how to phrase this."

He shrugged, waiting.

She sighed. "This is going to be a little confusing – but I'm really confused, too, so just bear with me. And please don't get up and leave right away, because I swear this isn't a joke. But either the rest of the world has gone crazy or I have, because…" She took a deep breath, let it out. "Because you're one of the most famous people in the world, and nobody else seems to remember but me."

He stared at her. The smile had diminished but wasn't entirely gone; all that was left was a nervous fragment. "What?"

She bit her lip. "You're Paul McCartney from Liverpool, right? You're a musician. All through the sixties you were a member of this band called the Beatles. You guys were an international phenomenon. I know it sounds crazy," she said, not bothering to keep the desperation out of her voice, "but I grew up listening to your music. Everybody did – at least, I thought everybody did."

He shook his head. "You're fucking with me."

"Please, I'm not. Why would I? Honestly tell me, why would I make this up?

"The sixties? Are you saying I'm- a reincarnation, or–"

"No," she said. "I'm saying you're him. Exactly him."

"But I've never heard of…" He couldn't say he had never heard of himself, so he shook his head again, looking lost. "Them. What's the band's name again?"

"The _Beatles_."

He wrinkled his nose. "Weird name for a band." He pulled out his phone. "You're sure that was a thing?"

"Googling it won't help, I already tried. Either they never existed or the world spontaneously forgot about them. But either way, I don't know what to do – I mean, maybe it's all just some weird dream of mine or something, but I knew your face. Like, _instantly_. And I knew you were from Liverpool."

"Anything else?" He wasn't convinced yet.

"Um…" This was when being a more hardcore fan would have come in handy. She wracked her brain, trying to think of all the random anecdotes Cassie had told her throughout her childhood about the Beatles. Several occurred to her, but they all had to do with the Beatles all together as a band – she didn't know any random facts about Paul's childhood that she could impress him (or, more likely, creep him out) with.

"Well, I don't know if this'll help," she said finally, "but I know the other people in the band. John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison? Do you know any of–" She stopped mid-sentence at the look on his face.

"George?" he repeated. "George Harrison?" He looked stunned for a moment, and then the smile broke over his features once again. "He was the one who put you up to this!"

"No," she said quickly, trying not to sound too excited. Thank God. Thank _God_ , there was something. Here was something. "No, he didn't," she said again, "but you know him? You know George Harrison?"

"'Course I know him, we rode the bus to grade school together," he said. "How do _you_ know him?"

"I _don't_ ," she said, exasperated. "He's famous, remember? Like you?"

"Huh."

He folded his arms and stared at her, his head cocked to one side. She couldn't help but think very briefly of a few videos she'd seen of early live Beatles performances, things Cassie had shown her, in which almost every song would feature Paul flicking his head sharply to one side at least once while he sang. Ear straight down to the shoulder and back up again. Like a tic.

"I don't know," he said. "I just don't know. If you are telling the truth – and I'm not saying I believe you, but if you are – it seems like George would be the next person to talk to."

"It seems that way," she agreed. "You're still friends, right?"

"Of course we're still friends." He pulled out his phone and dangled it in the air, grinning yet again, and then started to dial in a number.

"Lucky for you," he said, "I know just where to find him."


	2. Chapter 2

As it turned out, _just where to find him_ was a traffic stop on the other side of town. Neither Jean nor Paul had a car, so they caught a cab together from Pence Library, and as they were getting into the back Paul told the driver, "Corner of Karn and Washington, I think, in Belhurst."

The driver didn't question him, but Jean did. "You think? Don't you know where he lives?"

"Oh, he doesn't live there." Paul was looking down at his wristwatch.

"So…," Jean prompted, feeling annoyed at having to ask for clarification.

"So, we'll just find him there. If we get there on time." He knew he was confusing her, but he only looked at her and grinned, so she decided not to give him the satisfaction of asking.

It felt strange – barring the fact that she was sitting in a cab now with Paul McCartney, which was already strange – to be in a cab at all, watching downtown fade out into actual neighborhoods outside the window. She had only moved in a week ago, but she hadn't thought about how in that time she hadn't once left campus, hadn't seen any of the rest of the city. It was disappointing in some ways as they left behind them the old architecture and sprawling lawns of campus and the clustered cafes and shops of downtown, only to be replaced by a land of strip malls and near-uniform neighborhoods, but it was also somewhat refreshing. Calming. It looked more like the area Jean was from, Ajax, about forty minutes outside of Cavern, and there weren't so many college kids.

"Did you live around here?" she asked Paul absently, still looking out the window.

"Yeah," he said after a moment. God, that accent. It was too much. "Moved here when I was fifteen."

"From Liverpool?"

"Yep."

She hadn't thought about that – how he'd gotten here. If Paul was alive, now, in the twenty-first century, and so was George – assuming it was really George – did that mean John and Ringo were, too? And if they were, what if they were still in Liverpool? Why the hell weren't Paul and George in Liverpool? If they were going to reappear somewhere in the world as teenagers, she would have thought it would be there.

"Why'd you move?" she asked.

"My dad got a new job. I didn't mind it really, though, 'cause I met George."

"Plus all the girls here dig your accent," she said, without really meaning to.

He laughed. "How'd you know that?"

She shrugged. She could have guessed that even if she hadn't known who he was.

The cab started to pull over, just as Paul spotted a bus approaching them from the other side of the street. _Cavern County Public Schools_ was painted on the side in black block letters, along with the number _910_.

"Hey, that's it!" he exclaimed, unbuckling in a hurry. "That's the one!" He pushed open the door and got out without paying, so Jean rolled her eyes, thanked the cabdriver, and gave him a twenty before following.

The intersection was not a busy one; they had entered a residential neighborhood, and there were few other cars around as the bright yellow bus pulled to a stop at the sign. The doors folded open, and a handful of kids spilled out, mostly elementary kids and a few who looked older. Not one of them was familiar, and Jean glanced over to Paul in confusion, but he wasn't looking at her. He was jogging over to the bus, and as soon as the last kid was off, he headed up the steps, gesturing at the last second for Jean to follow.

Following Paul up the steps, it took Jean a moment to realize what was going on. She looked over the rows of seats and saw no one who looked remotely like George Harrison, and then next to her she heard Paul saying, "Hallo, George!" so she turned around, and there he was.

In the driver's seat.

He didn't look old enough to be a bus driver; he barely even looked old enough to be a senior in high school. His hair was dark, the same shade as Paul's, and short – shorter than she was used to seeing it in photographs. He was grinning widely – his mouth had a way of stretching for length, of going for the biggest possible smile while somehow still seeming perfectly natural – and he got up from the seat for a moment to clap Paul on the back by way of greeting.

"Wasn't expecting to find you here," he said.

His accent, just like Paul's, was unmistakable. Dana used to make fun of it sometimes, saying it always sounded like he had something taking up space in his mouth, but Cassie liked it, and so did Jean.

"Hi, Paul!" chorused a few of the kids on the bus. Jean gave up and knitted her eyebrows together, staring at all of them with open disbelief on her face.

"Who's this?" asked George, looking at Jean.

"This is Jean–"

"Jean Carlisle," said Jean, barely even hearing Paul. "I'm in Paul's politics class."

"Ah, politics," said George, reaching over to shift a lever and bringing the bus into gear. The bus began pulling away from the intersection and continuing on through the neighborhood, and Jean had to grip the first pleather seat with one hand to keep her balance. "And here I told him that wouldn't be any fun."

"You're – sorry – you're a bus driver?" At least in this case her confusion was somewhat credible. She couldn't walk onto a bus full of people and say, _You're a musical legend, how are you alive?_ but she could definitely say, _You're a sixteen-year-old kid, how are you driving a school bus?_

"Ah, not if the administration asks," said Paul, grinning.

"What's that mean?"

"Well, George here wasn't having such a great time at school – and Bernie, the old bus driver, wasn't having such a great time driving the bus every day. So they worked out a deal this year," Paul explained. "Most days – whenever George isn't up for class – he drives the bus himself. That way his folks think he's at school, Bernie gets paid, and George here has got himself a vehicle."

"Gas all paid for, too," George added. "I'm living the dream, really."

"That's…" Jean blinked. "That's actually really smart."

"George is really smart," Paul said proudly. "He just got some awful teachers, is all. Otherwise he'd be over at Mensa, wouldn't you, George?"

"Sod off."

"He's touchy about his genius," Paul told Jean confidentially. She had never heard anything about George Harrison being a genius, but he didn't particularly seem to agree with Paul anyway, so she decided to go along with it.

George turned a corner sharply, so sharply that several of the kids were abruptly shifted down where they sat. Jean was holding onto one of the seats, but Paul was thrown into the empty row he had been standing next to, disappearing behind the pleather and then reappearing a moment later with a look of mock annoyance on his face. The kids in the first few rows burst out laughing.

"Sorry," said George, "did I get you there?"

"Sod off."

"He's touchy about my bus driving skills," George told Jean.

He pulled over again and pushed down the lever to open the bus doors, and a bigger trail of kids dismounted, leaving only five or six left on the bus.

"So," said George as they pulled away from the curb, "did you all just come to say hi?"

"Wanted to introduce you to Jean," said Paul. "Isn't she great?"

"Oh yes," said George, "it's been a grand thirty seconds. I'm George Harrison, by the way," he added to Jean, as though that was a sentence that could ever end reasonably with _by the way_.

"It's nice to meet you," she said weakly.

"Can we go to your house when you're done?" Paul asked George.

"Sure."

It only took him around fifteen minutes to drop off the rest of the kids. It turned out he had something of a habit of taking sharp turns every once in a while or speeding over speed bumps, just to make the kids laugh, but he was actually a very good driver when he wasn't messing around. On the main roads when other cars were around he would go slowly, almost to the point that Jean would get impatient.

Once the last kids had gotten off, saying goodbye to George and Paul and Jean on their way out, Paul asked if he could drive, and George let him and started trying to climb on top of the rows of seat backs. Lying down, he was tall enough to balance his body over three seats, and Jean thought it looked fun, so she climbed on top of the seats on the other side of the aisle to try. Paul flicked through a few radio stations before miraculously finding one that was playing music, and the music was pretty shitty and kept crackling in and out, but he turned it up to blasting volume anyway and started to drive faster, trying to throw George and Jean off the tops of the seats at every corner. The most he succeeded in doing was rolling them around, but they always managed to catch themselves before they fell, until he braked very suddenly at a stop sign and they were both sent tumbling down to sprawl across the seats and the floor of the bus. It was a wonder they didn't ever get pulled over.

By the time they pulled up in front of George's house, all three of them were laughing, and Jean had gotten so used to the blaring music that the air around them felt suddenly voided as soon as Paul turned the bus off.

They parked the bus right in George's driveway. "I think you caught my arm pretty well on that last one," George told Paul as they got out.

"It was retribution," Paul said. "Throwing me into that seat before, it banged my spine a little."

"Funny, I didn't know you had a spine."

Paul reached over to thwack him, and George dodged it just in time.

Rather than walking over to the front door of his house, he unlocked the side door by the drive, a thin white wooden door with a screen in front of it. Then he walked in, kicking his shoes off in the entry, and Paul and Jean followed.

George's house was small but not cramped; in ways, it kind of reminded Jean of her own family's house. Knotted cloth rugs lay over the wooden floors of narrow hallways, and there were a few cheap framed paintings on the walls. He led them past the bathroom and a room that looked like the kitchen, up a steep flight of stairs, and into his own room. It was square with a low, slanted ceiling – the roof of this house; this must have been the attic – and the walls were papered with musical icons spanning the last century. Most of them were old; the grandeur of the music industry had been fading out pretty steadily over the last couple of decades, and it was no secret that society had largely lost its enthusiasm for it. George's taste apparently went way back; he had posters of Chuck Berry, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton, and – by far the most featured person on his wall – Bob Dylan.

"Subversive," Jean commented. It was hard to find places where posters like these were even sold anymore, and here George's room was covered with them. She felt calm for the most part, but confusion kept building and multiplying inside her. So Bob Dylan had really happened, Janis Joplin had really happened. Where did the Beatles fit in, if not on this wall?

"Georgie? Never," said Paul.

"You're a Dylan fan?" she asked George.

His facial expression didn't change, but his tone of voice conveyed mild surprise. "Are you?"

She shrugged. "I just know a couple songs. 'Like a Rolling Stone,' 'Mr. Tambourine Man.' My mom's a pretty big fan." She was starting to wish she'd listened to Cassie a little more as a kid, gleaned a little more knowledge.

"He was a genius," said George, with a reverence in his voice she hadn't heard from him yet. His eyes seemed suddenly engaged; she hadn't even realized that they were disengaged before, until now. "I mean, if you just listen to the lyrics, it's _poetry_ –"

"Ah, don't get him riled up about Dylan," Paul broke in, "we'll never get out of here. Listen, speaking of music," he said, "Jeanie's got a bombshell for us, George." He flopped back to sit on George's bed, just as George sat down on the floor. Feeling too tall now in the small room, Jean followed suit.

George was watching her expectantly. Suddenly she didn't want to say anything, didn't want to tell him. Even though she had only met him half an hour ago, something about George struck her as a little more grounded than Paul – maybe in his composure, or the way his facial expression rarely changed unless he was actually affected by something. He seemed like he was of this world, like he made sense, and even more, like he was thinking things about the world that she would never have a chance to know unless he spoke them aloud. He was going to think she had lost it – hell, even _she_ sort of felt like she had lost it.

"It's going to sound weird," she said.

"I'm listening," said George.

"He's _all ears_ ," put in Paul.

George shot him a look but offered no other response. Jean tried not to smile; George's ears _were_ kind of big, and she got the feeling this wasn't the first time Paul had made that joke.

"Well…," Jean started carefully. Her eyes flicked away from George and down into her lap, but then it didn't feel right not to be looking at him when she said it, so she looked back up again. "Nobody else seems to know or remember – including you, I guess – but you're…" She tried to think of a good way to say it, and her gaze landed again on George's wall, on the posters. "You belong on that wall."

George raised his eyebrows. "In my dreams, maybe. Is that all?"

"No, I mean – I mean actually. You're George Harrison. You were in a band called the Beatles, in the sixties, with Paul here and two other guys. You were hugely successful – you were from England, but you came to America eventually, you went everywhere, all around the world. I don't know what happened, but up until a few hours ago, everybody knew who guys were. _Everybody._ "

George stared at her.

Paul was grinning. "Isn't it good?" he asked George, as though Jean had just told a funny joke.

"I'm not messing around," said Jean desperately. "I'm serious. Paul, you don't believe me?"

He shrugged, looking away from her now. "I mean, she did know we were from Liverpool," he told George, "which was kind of weird. And she knew who you were. I figured you'd met."

"We haven't met," said George. "At least, I don't think we've met."

"For Christ's sake," said Jean. "I'm telling you, everyone knows your songs. 'All You Need is Love,' 'Here Comes the Sun,' 'Hey Jude,' 'Yellow Submarine,' 'When I'm Sixty-Four'. None of this sounds familiar?"

George shrugged. His face was blank.

"Shit," muttered Jean.

"Wait," said Paul suddenly. He was frowning. "What – what was that last one?"

She looked at him. "'When I'm Sixty-Four'?"

"Yeah, how does it go?"

"You know–" She tried singing, briefly, a line from the chorus. " _When I'm sixty-four_ …" Then she stopped, shook her head, and tried to remember how the song started. "Um – _when I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…_ "

Paul was still watching her, his face losing a little of its color. She kept going.

" _Will you still be sending me a valentine / Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? / If I'd been out 'til quarter to three, would you lock the door…_ "

Paul joined in then, almost in a whisper. " _Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four._ "

Her heart was hammering. "You do know it," she whispered, her throat dry. "You know it."

He stared at her. "How the hell did you know that song?"

 _How the hell did_ you _know it?_ she wondered. "I told you," she said, and she surprised herself with how calm and level her voice sounded. "You're famous."

"What was that, Paul?" asked George. He had reached over for a guitar sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, and now he began plucking it a little, softly and absentmindedly, with his fingers.

"It's a – it's a song," said Paul, kind of stupidly. "I wrote it in high school. I've had it in my head for a while, never did anything with it. Or…" He blinked, staring at Jean. "Maybe I did?"

"In another lifetime," George supplied.

"So you do write songs," Jean pounced. "So you are a musician? And you, too?" she added to George. She had been watching his fingers on the guitar strings without realizing it.

"I mean, yeah," said Paul. "But we're not – you know, we're not first-rate, we're not what you're describing."

"Maybe you will be," she said quietly.

There was a pause in the room, and the words sent a chill down her own spine – she hadn't even known she was going to say them. Was that what she was doing? Bringing back the Beatles, resetting history?

George gave the guitar a rest for a moment. "D'you know any more songs for us, Jean?" he asked, sounding curious.

She swallowed. "Plenty," she said dryly, "but none that I think you'd know. You wrote them all in your twenties, most of them when you were already famous – and a lot of them, I think, Paul co-wrote with John."

"Who's John?" Paul asked.

 _Who's John._ To have Paul asking her, _Who's John._

"John Lennon," she said. "He's got to be the most iconic one out of all of you. No offense," she added, as an afterthought.

"Iconic, how's that?" asked George.

She shrugged. "Funky glasses. His girlfriend, Yoko Ono. And, I don't know – a bunch of things." There was a simple answer, of course, but she wasn't sure if she could even tell them.

The assassination. The fact that John Lennon had been shot dead on the street in 1980. Of course, all of the Beatles had ended up dying at some time or another, but John…The way some people saw it, in addition to it being so gruesome and unexpected, his death had been the closing of one age, the beginning of another. There were the sixties, Beatlemania, psychedelia, civil rights, change and war and peace and love – the band's breakup – the seventies, when they were all working on solo careers, and John Lennon was doing "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" and talking all the time about peace while the government struggled to sort out the mess that was Vietnam. Then the death of John Lennon. Then the eighties, the nineties, the turn of the century. Reagan and the economy and Bush and Afghanistan and terrorism and _Make America Great Again._ They had never gone back.

Obviously a lot of that, even most of it, had nothing to do with Lennon at all. But it was still there, and his death for some reason felt to her like a benchmark, a wall between national sentiments.

She shook her head and shrugged again. "I don't know," she repeated quietly. "A lot of things."

Paul and George exchanged glances. She hadn't meant to sound cryptic, but they all knew that it had come across that way.

Then Paul said knowingly to George, "I think she means he was the cute one."

Jean burst out laughing.

"What?" said Paul.

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

She tried to compose herself, but she couldn't stop smiling.

After a moment George straightened up, lifting the guitar off his lap and placing it gently back on the floor next to him. "All right," he said, sitting forward and looking from Jean to Paul and back over to Jean again. "If the man's so damn iconic, maybe we ought to have a word with him."


	3. Chapter 3

Unlike with George, finding John was easier said than done. Jean had already tried Googling him, after all, and nothing had come up. She didn't know either of his parents' names or what school he might go to, what neighborhood he might live in – forget neighborhood, she didn't even know what _country_ he lived in. She knew from Cassie that John had been the first of the Beatles to be in a band, and that the Beatles had actually grown from that band, but she couldn't remember what the band was called, and even if she could, it might be called something different now. If he was even in one. If he even existed.

"It's hopeless," she said finally, after they had brainstormed for a while, sitting back against the base of George's bed. "We've got nothing."

George got up off the floor without saying anything, strolled over to the door, and left the room. They could hear his footsteps trotting down the stairs.

"Where's he going?" Jean asked Paul.

Paul shrugged. "Bathroom? Hey, who's the fourth guy?"

"What fourth guy?"

"This – this band you keep talking about," he said – almost eagerly, Jean thought. Like the word _band_ made him excited. "You said there were four of us?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah." She rubbed her eyes and shook her head; thinking about Ringo only deepened her feeling of dejection. "I've got even less of an idea of how to find _him_ ," she said. "His name's Ringo Starr, but it's like his stage name. I've got no idea what his real name is. Richard something, I think."

Paul nodded and sat back. His gaze had drifted a little, and he stretched out now before bringing his knees loosely up to his chest, staring into space.

"What?" she asked him.

"What?"

"What are you thinking about?"

He shrugged. He had picked up George's guitar sometime in the last twenty minutes, and he was fiddling with it now, the same way George had been earlier. "Just what you were saying," he said. "About the band. Were we…Were we any good?"

She felt something inside her relax a little, soften. He really had no clue. Who he was, what he could do. She got up and sat down across from him on the bed, criss-cross applesauce.

"You were revolutionary," she said. "You all were."

She could tell he was apprehensive about looking too happy, but he smiled at that. "Really?"

"Yes," she said, and meant it. "You changed the way people thought about love, about music, about the world. About each other. I mean, a bunch of other people did, too – but you were such a huge part of it." She shook her head. "I don't really know what this is – what's happening. I mean, if we were to find John and Ringo – if you guys were to start, like, making music again _now_ , if you wanted to – I wouldn't want to, you know, set anything up wrong, or spoil anything. Or get all your hopes up and then have you end up sucking this time around," she added, and Paul laughed.

"Well, we could try it," said Paul fairly. "I mean I'd be up for trying it. If I get along with everyone. And if they're good. I know George is good."

As if on cue, George came back in through the doorway. He was holding a phone book.

"Right, so we know the name," he said, smiling, "let's look up the number."

"Smart lad!" Paul applauded him.

George dropped down onto the floor and flipped through the book until he got to the _L_ s. "Oh, wow," he remarked.

"What?" asked Paul.

"Nothing. 'S just, I wasn't expecting this many Lennons in the state…Charles Lennon, David P. Lennon, Julia Lennon…"

"How many are there?" asked Jean.

"Six." He dug a cell phone out of his back pocket and started to dial.

"What are you doing?"

"What's it look like?" He grinned, and before she could answer, he was talking again. "Hello, Charles? Hi, listen, is John there?" He paused. "That's all right. Thanks anyway, Charles," he said, his tone fond and friendly, before hanging up. "Well, don't just stand there," he said to the others. "Have I got to call all six?"

Jean and Paul took out their phones.

"You take Julia and Michael," Paul told her, "I'll take care of R.W. and Samuel."

Jean nodded, already dialing Julia's number into her phone. It rang a few times and then went to voicemail, so she dialed Michael Lennon's in next.

"Yo," he said. "Mike here."

"Um, hi," she said, turning away from Paul and George and covering her other ear so that she could hear, as they were both on their own phones now, too. "I'm looking for John."

"Wrong number, sorry."

Her heart sank. "His last name's Lennon, do you have a brother or anything who–"

The man had already hung up.

She sat back. "Well, that hit the ground pretty quickly," she muttered. "Any luck on your ends?"

George was shaking his head, but Paul was still on the phone with somebody. A grin had spread across his face.

"All right," he was saying. "All right, sure. The Otter Theatre, tomorrow at eight – we'll meet up? Do you need me to – all right. Yeah, right on. Bye," he said after a pause, and there was more smile in the sound of that word alone, _bye_ , than Jean thought she had ever seen on anyone's actual face.

"You found him?" she asked.

Paul shook his head, the grin still stuck there. He looked satisfied with himself. George rolled his eyes.

"That was–" She grabbed the phone book to look. "Samuel Lennon, right?"

"He's probably got a daughter or something," George said.

"He most definitely has," Paul agreed.

"What's her name?"

"Anna."

Now it was Jean's turn to roll her eyes. She couldn't think of anything to say, but luckily she was saved from having to say anything by the sound of her phone ringing. It was an unknown number from their same area code, and she picked it up right away, waving at Paul and George to shut up so that she could hear.

"Hello?"

"Hello?" It was a woman's voice; she sounded pleasant enough, almost playful, even. "I missed a call from this number?"

"You–" She frowned, and then it hit her. "Are you Julia Lennon?"

"Yes," said the woman. "Who's asking?" She didn't sound angry, only curious.

"My name's Jean Carlisle," said Jean. "I'm looking for John Lennon. Are you by chance related to him?"

The woman was silent for a moment. "John Lennon," she repeated, her tone of voice a little altered – though to what end, Jean couldn't have said. Maybe she sounded flustered, or maybe it was something else. "He a friend of yours?"

"Not exactly – do you know him?"

There was another pause on the other line. "I'm sorry," the woman said then. "I can't help you."

"Ma'am, are you sure you don't–"

 _Click_. The woman had hung up.

Jean took the phone away from her ear, stared at it for a moment, and then sighed. "No luck," she told Paul and George, trying to keep her voice from sounding heavy. "It's no use."

"He's got to be around here somewhere," said Paul, "hasn't he? I mean, if me and George are?"

"Maybe we'll meet him whether we're looking for him or not," said George. "You know, with fate."

Jean didn't believe much in fate. To her, anything related to the idea of cosmic destiny was a fantasy born of fortune cookies and two-bit psychics' shops. Under the circumstances, though, she let it slide.

She sat back against the base of George's bed and rubbed the palms of her hands into her eyes. She hadn't realized how tired she was until now, now that it was hitting her. She had gone to bed late and woken up early practically every day since getting here, whether for class or for something orientation-related, and now she could feel it all catching up.

"You look tired," said George, in a tone of voice that suggested that he knew it was a terribly obvious thing to say but was saying it anyway.

"I'm sure we'll find him," said Paul, "if he exists."

"Yeah," said Jean, "I know." How was it that she cared so much about this – that she felt _so much_ like it mattered – when twenty-four hours ago none of this had been on her mind at all?

"Here," said Paul, "we're not going to accomplish much tonight anyway–"

"Not with that attitude," said George.

"So let's talk about something else, huh? Maybe if we clear our minds of it a little, we'll have some space to think and we can work it out tomorrow."

"What do you want to talk about?" asked Jean dully.

She felt stunted, blocked – here she had found George Harrison only a few hours after finding Paul, and now she was halted at John Lennon, probably the most interesting Beatle of all. She knew they would try again tomorrow or the next day or some other time soon, knew that Paul and George were beginning to believe her and that that alone already counted as progress, but what more was there for them to try? Without John, without Ringo, none of this would work – was this the story? Her magically finding two of the Beatles and then having nothing else happen?

"Let's talk about you," George suggested.

"How come?"

"'Cause it feels odd, sitting here going on about all this wonderful stuff me and Paul never did. Feels wrong."

Jean hadn't thought about that – the idea that she existed here as much as they did, and not just as an intermediary. "Um, okay," she said. She didn't like talking about herself and wouldn't normally do it often – it was less to do with her being shy and more a matter of not wanting to have to skirt around the fact that she had two moms. They had warned her about it since she was a kid, warned her about letting anything slip, about how they could both be arrested and taken away from her if anybody found out.

"Okay," she said again, reluctantly. "Well, I grew up in Ajax. I'm middle class…"

Paul and George laughed nearly simultaneously at that.

"What?" she demanded. "You asked for information."

"And that was the first thing you thought of about yourself?" said Paul.

"I was just trying to paint a picture of my life, okay?" She glared at him, at both of them. "Look, I can stop if–"

"No," Paul cut her off, "no, don't. What about your interests? What do you like?"

"What is this, a questionnaire?"

"Well, since you already know everything about me and George."

She stared at him as if to ask, _Really?_ and he stared straight back. As if to say, _Yes_.

"Okay," she said. "Um…"

Starting college, she'd been asked about her interests a lot recently, and she never really gave a straight reply. Drawing was always the first thing she thought of, but it seemed like such a second-rate answer, especially compared to all of the active political stuff Mae spent her time doing. Jean had thought about trying to go into something business- or politics-related – she had no reason to think she'd be bad at it – but she couldn't stomach most of the other people in those classes. How Mae had managed to get through four years of pretentious future millionaires with ego problems, she would never know.

But of course, right now she wasn't talking to some stranger at an orientation event, or her academic counselor, or a judgmental neighbor. These were Paul McCartney and George Harrison, and suddenly she realized that of course she could talk about her drawing. She never gave anybody a real answer about this, but there _was_ a real answer, and there was simply no reason not to own it.

"I like drawing," she said.

"You mean logos?" asked George.

Jean shook her head. "No, real drawings. And paintings. Of people and landscapes and everything – everything I see."

"Give the girl a little credit, George," said Paul in mock offense.

It hadn't been an unfair conclusion to draw. Funding had been sucked entirely out of the arts in recent years – they didn't teach it in public schools anymore, to leave room for classes in business and Bible study, and it was actively discouraged as a career path. Creative writing had been dwindling for a long while now as Jim Truebold, the President of the last eight years, had steadily mounted restrictions over what could actually be said or implied in print; music was on its way out for much the same reason, and visual art, what Jean really cared about, had been the first to go. For the most part, logos were as far as anybody really got anymore.

"Way to pick a shaky thing to be passionate about, Jean," said George in mock disapproval, threading his fingers pointedly through the guitar strings and then letting them go with an abrupt twang. She smiled.

"I'll do my best to be passionate about economics the next time around," she said.

"Can we see some drawings?" asked Paul.

Jean hesitated. She did still have her backpack, downstairs in the entry to George's house, and inside the backpack was her sketchbook…But only Mae had ever seen her sketches, and she had just met Paul and George, no matter _how_ famous they were.

"I…"

She stopped, suddenly, at the feeling of her phone vibrating again in her pocket. She dug it out: it was Mae. "Sorry," she said, getting to her feet and trying not to look relieved at an excuse to change the conversation. "My sister's calling. Be right back?"

They waved her out of the room; Paul was already reaching over to try to tug the guitar away from George.

Jean trotted down the narrow staircase, waiting until she was on the lower landing before picking up the phone.

"Mae?"

"Jean!" Mae was breathless; it sounded like she was walking somewhere at a fast pace. Then again, she always sounded like that over the phone, now that she lived in D.C. more than ever. "You'll _never guess_ what I just found out."

It had to be something political. Mae had no personal life to speak of, wasn't invested enough in other people to care this much. Anytime she sounded this excited, it was something political.

"Truebold is running," Mae said. "Jim Truebold. He's running for office."

Jean was dumbfounded. "For – for President?"

"Yes."

"Against Kerry Walter?"

"Yeah."

Kerry Walter was the senator whose campaign had hired Mae out of college. Truebold was the President already, had been for two terms now, and a lot of underground liberals – like Jean's parents – had been hoping the country would pivot back with the new election. Not back to liberalism necessarily, but back to being reasonable, back to what it had been around the time Jean had been born – smart people with experience running against other smart people with experience, compromising, setting forth rational policy ideas, and not whatever crazed shitshow the political field had become in the years since. With Kerry Walter in particular, many of them had seen hope – here was someone people might actually listen who, who wasn't afraid to try to change things back drastically, to give human rights back to Muslims, back to immigrants, back to gay people, back to everyone.

"But that's illegal," Jean said, finally finding her voice.

"I know."

"He can't do that."

"I know."

"How can he–"

"People love him too much." She sounded livid, Jean realized, in contrast to Jean's own voice, which was hoarse with panic. Mae loved politics, in spite of everything wrong with it, and she was too angry to be panicked. "No one's contesting it. No one's _going_ to contest it. Maybe a few years back they would've, but they're all too afraid of him now. And a lot of people think we need him for another term. They think there's too much danger right now with deviance in America, and we can't risk letting in some crazy liberal like Kerry Walter, not when the right people are finally on top and we've finally got everybody on the ropes–" She stopped, and Jean could tell she was on the verge of crying. "Like with FDR," she said then. "We were at war and nobody wanted another president anyway, so they just kept him on."

Jean remained silent, standing there in George's living room, seeing everything around her and yet registering nothing. Nobody was around, no parents, no siblings. Upstairs she could hear the faint strumming of George's guitar.

"But he's so…" She shook her head. "Mae, he wants to be able to imprison anyone who disagrees with him. He actually wants that to be a law."

"I know."

"He's talked about torture. Internment camps, for Christ's sake." It sounded ridiculous when she said it aloud, like she was talking about something out of some other country, or a storybook, even.

"I know."

"He still has to run a campaign, right? I mean, Walter, she still has a chance?"

"Yeah, he has to. Technically. I mean…I just don't know, Jean." The fury had subsided just a little, and she sounded tired. "So many people like him. I don't know why, but they do. So many people."

Jean had no idea what to say. She thought briefly of Silas Faring, and all of the other kids she'd met who were like him - who were their parents, and where were their homes? Where did they come from, that they seemed so full of hate?

She could remember, vaguely, the first time Truebold had been elected. She had been nine or ten. A brief swing of rationalism had followed the Turningpoint Election and _Make America Great Again_ , and Dana and Cassie had grown hopeful that things would all go back to the way they had been before, but then had come Truebold. The family had only waited a month after the election before moving. The criminalization of homosexuality to its current extremes was still just a thought at the time, but they had all known it was coming, had all known they would need to relocate before anybody who knew them turned them in. If they waited, Dana had explained, they would only look suspicious when the time finally came. Cassie had moved out for a while.

"I think," said Jean finally, swallowing to clear her voice and trying to sound a little more confident, "Walter's campaign will have nothing to worry about. Not if you're a part of it."

They both knew these were fairly empty words in actuality, but when Mae spoke, she sounded appreciative. "Thanks, Jean."

Suddenly a thumping noise sounded from the floor above her, followed by a call: "Oy, Jean, get up here!"

Mae heard. "Gotta go?"

"Sorry," said Jean. "I'll talk to you later, okay? Love you."

"Love you."

She hurried up the stairs and found Paul and George clustered together, standing up now and looking together down at the cell phone in Paul's hand. The guitar lay alone on the small bed, practically forgotten. Both Paul and George wore serious, pale expressions, although it was a little more striking on Paul, as his face didn't normally look like that. And instantly, without having to ask, she knew.

"Truebold."

Paul looked up. "How did you know?"

"Jean knows everything, it seems," said George dismissively.

Paul barely even heard him; he hadn't cared about how Jean knew, not really, his attention was still on Truebold. "But it's–"

"Illegal," said Jean. "I know."

George flopped back onto his bed and picked up his guitar again. He started playing some sliding, high-strung tune that Jean wasn't familiar with, and that she suspected he was making up on the spot, up and down across all of the frets and strings, quick and anxious at first and then slower, becoming gradually a song infinitely sad and full of grace, and Jean and Paul listened, because there was nothing at that moment between any of them that could have been said with words.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, they found no further clues as to the whereabouts (or existences) of John and Ringo, but the furor over the presidential campaign of Jim Truebold was such that they often forgot all about them. Students organized demonstrations in protest downtown and at the Square, which were then picketed by equal or greater numbers of students and faculty who supported Truebold. It was on every news station, it came up in every casual conversation, every phone call. Professor Mickey dedicated an entire class period to a debate over the legality of Truebold's reelection campaign, but it quickly lapsed into an impassioned conflict over the morality of his policies themselves.

"For the last time," Silas Faring said, "he's not extreme. Maybe thirty years ago he would've been extreme, but that was then. This is now."

Agnes couldn't keep her hand down. "I'm sorry, Silas," she blurted out, practically before Mickey had even called on her, "but what's the difference? Morality doesn't change over time at all. Some things are just wrong, and making it out as a matter of 'national safety' and 'what the times call for' only distracts people from what's really being done."

"And what is being done?" Silas fired back.

"What's being _done_? People's rights are being violated, people are getting starved and killed and nobody's answering for it, people are being separated from their families and forced out of the country."

"I like her," whispered Paul, nudging Jean in the shoulder. He had started sitting on her other side, a couple of seats down from Agnes, since they'd met.

"You like everyone," Jean whispered back, barely even paying attention to him; she cared about what was being said, and she wanted to say something herself, she just wasn't sure _what_. She knew she wasn't as quick or as eloquent as Agnes, but she still had to throw in her own voice, to add some support to what Agnes was saying.

So much of their politics class had become a ceaseless war of semantics between Agnes Ferrera and Silas Faring. Mickey did all she could to keep them away from each other's throats, but more often than not Agnes was the one who walked away feeling frustrated, as Silas always, without fail, had the most support from his classmates. Jean wondered what it was possibly like at their house.

"Even if that _were_ the full story–" Silas began.

"What more is there to know?" Agnes cried. "What could possibly make any of that okay?"

"Settle down," murmured Mickey at the front of the class, more out of duty than interest; Jean could tell she was as interested in the war as everyone else in the room.

"Even if that were the full story," Silas repeated loudly, "you really think all of that is Truebold? One man? That's just unrealistic."

Jean raised her hand, but she didn't wait for Mickey to call on her before she spoke.

"Of course it's not just Truebold," she said, "he's just the easiest place to see it. He's a racist and a sexist and a homophobe and more, and he's so obvious about it, in the things that he says and in the laws that he passes – everything is just _hateful_. There's no honest goodwill in anything that he does, _anything_. And we all bear that – we're all responsible for that – we elected him, both times, and we've supported him, and we elected every senator and every Congressman who ever helped him push his ideals. The problem isn't just with him, that would be too easy, it's with America, it's with _all_ of us. Nobody wants to admit they have hatred and bigotry in their hearts – but when they elect a man like Truebold, when they stand behind the things that he says, they make it so obvious. They give those feelings a personification that makes them seem real and valid to other people, and then other people respond with those same feelings. The problem is way bigger than Truebold, but he is what gives the problem a credible voice, and _that's_ what people have a problem with. Supporting him means we support all of it. That's why we can't elect him again."

When she stopped talking, Paul and Agnes were staring at her, and only then did she realize that that was the first time she had willingly participated in class, let alone talked for so long and with such firmness in her voice.

A moment later Silas came up with some bullshit argument, and Agnes came up with some subjective rebuttal, and the two of them started going at it again – with a few others occasionally chipping in on both sides, more often than not on Silas' – until suddenly, all too quickly, the period was over.

Mickey stopped Jean on the way out of class for the second time that semester. "I think that was the most I've ever heard you say at a time, Jean."

"That's the most I've ever cared about something in this class," Jean replied.

Immediately she felt horrified at herself – had she really just said that? And to a teacher? It had been automatic, she hadn't even been aware she was thinking it first.

"Oh my god," she said instantly, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean–"

Luckily, though, miraculously, Mickey was smiling. Thank God. Any other professor would have fried her on the spot, but here was merciful Mickey, smiling.

"You're fine," said Mickey, "you're fine. At least you're honest. And I'm glad when students who are only taking this for a requirement start to care a little. That's why I teach politics, and not history or science – because it matters to the world, Jean. How much you care." She was looking straight at her and really weighting her words, Jean could tell, like she wanted Jean to hear her. "Even if you haven't got the slightest interest in politics at all, it's your civic duty to force yourself to take an interest. If only long enough to cast a vote." She smiled then and started walking down the aisle toward the double doors, and Jean followed. "Although something tells me that won't be a problem for you."

"I definitely plan on voting," Jean said, "don't worry." She would be eighteen this next election, which meant it was going to be the first one in which she _could_ vote. It seemed like it would be ridiculous not to.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Mickey. "And in more casual news, I see you've become friends with that boy you pointed out the first day?"

"Oh," said Jean quickly, "yeah, we're friends, but we're not–"

"I ship it," said Mickey unexpectedly.

Jean blinked. "Um – thanks, Mickey."

They were outside in the hallway now, and Mickey was turning off down the corridor. Jean lingered behind, splitting off to leave the building.

"Go get 'em, Carlisle," Mickey called over her shoulder, without looking back.

Jean suppressed a smile. "Thanks, Mickey," she said again, but she wasn't sure if the professor even heard her.

Paul and Agnes were waiting for her outside, chatting at the bottom of the steps. She jogged quickly down to join them, and they started off as a group toward the Square. Autumn was beginning to settle into campus, and Jean focused on crunching leaves under her feet as they walked. Paul and Agnes were talking about vegetarianism – Agnes was vegan – but Jean's mind was still back in the lecture hall, with Professor Mickey, with Silas Faring. Silas Faring, with his plaid shirts and farm jeans and his _Make America Great Again_ caps. It was still hard to believe he and Agnes had ever lived in the same house. What did a kid like that even do in his spare time?

Her phone was ringing; she pulled it out and held it up to one ear, tuning out Paul and Agnes. "Hello?"

"Jean?" It was Dana. She sounded uncharacteristically upset – not tearful or anything, but her voice was trembling just slightly, and Jean could tell. Dana was a controlled and tense person in general, and she grew even more controlled and tense when she was upset, because she had to fight that much harder to keep her voice steady.

"Mom?" Jean slowed down. "Is something wrong?"

"Jean, something's happened. Cassie…"

"Is she okay?"

"She's fine," said Dana quickly, "she's just upset. I don't want you to worry–"

"No one's hurt or anything, right?" Jean had stopped walking now entirely, and Paul and Agnes had stopped too and were staring at her with concern. It felt like a silly question to ask, a too-quick conclusion out of some stupid melodramatic movie.

"No," said Dana.

Of course not, of course not. Jean exhaled. _Everything's fine._

"Then," she asked, "what happened?"

"Someone – painted something."

"What?" It took a moment for the meaning to reach her. "On the house? What does it say?"

Dana drew in a sharp breath. "Just – a slur. It doesn't matter. But the whole neighborhood's seen it."

"Jesus, Mom." Her heart was pounding. "Are you going to–" She couldn't say the word _move_ , couldn't. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

"Does Mae know? About the–"

"Yes. I just got off the phone with her."

"I'm coming," said Jean.

"Jean, don't."

"I am."

"It's not–"

"I have to see Cassie. Okay? And you. I'll be there as soon as I can."

"Jean–"

"I love you," said Jean.

She could hear Dana sighing on the other line. "I love you, too. So much."

The _so much_ only solidified Jean's decision to go – Dana rarely told Jean she loved her at all, and the emphasis felt unnatural, even meaningful.

"What's going on?" asked Agnes, the instant Jean had hung up the phone.

She shook her head. There wasn't a straight way to answer, not without telling them about her parents…She knew, based off of Agnes' hatred of Silas and everything she said during lecture, that she wouldn't even blink before accepting the information. But Paul…Would he care enough? Was he _safe_ enough?

She didn't want to have to sort it all out, not right then. "Some dick in our neighborhood," she said vaguely. "Threatened my parents."

Paul looked stunned. "What? Why?"

"They're just not super popular in the neighborhood. It doesn't matter."

Agnes was staring at her. "Jean–"

"It doesn't matter," she said again, more forcefully this time. "Listen, Agnes, do you have a car?"

Agnes bit her lip. She looked hesitant, but something in the expression on Jean's face must have hammered something in for her, because after a moment she nodded. "We can take my dad's."

"Should we catch a cab to your house, then?" asked Paul.

"You don't have to come," Jean told him, "honestly." In fact, she wasn't even entirely sure whether she wanted him to or not – she considered him her friend by now, and it might be good to have somebody there with her other than Agnes and her parents, but all of that was assuming she could trust him – and that was too much for her to think about right now.

"I know," he said, with infuriating certainty. "I want to."

His face looked so earnest. She didn't want to want him to come, but there was still a part of her that couldn't help it.

She rolled her eyes, giving up. "Fine." She still didn't explain, though – who knew, maybe he would change his mind or something along the way. Yet even as she thought it, she knew the mere idea was ridiculous.

Agnes insisted that they wait for her to pick them up rather than going with her to her house to get her car, so they idled in a library for about half an hour, studying a lot more than speaking. At least they did a very good job of pretending they were studying. Jean didn't feel like talking much, and to his credit Paul seemed to understand that, because after a while he began amusing himself with a yo-yo from out of his backpack and didn't look over at her at all unless she spoke to him first, except for once.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

She shrugged. "No."

Paul nodded and went back to his yo-yo.

Jean was just starting to kick herself for forgetting about George's bus – they could have left right away if she had only remembered – when Agnes pulled up outside and honked. Her dad's car was a beaten pickup truck with torn seats, and it didn't seem to fit Agnes, but Jean could have pictured Silas driving it in a heartbeat. Agnes must have lived somewhere rural, maybe out in the farmland that made up the eastern outskirts of Cavern. There was dirt spattered across the windshield and sprayed up under the wheels.

None of the stations were playing music, and nobody wanted to listen to the news, so they drove the half hour over to Ajax in relative silence. Jean gave Agnes directions, and Paul occasionally tried striking up weak conversation by pointing out random things passing by outside the window. _Who ever knew there were so many cows out here? I wonder why you notice airplanes so much more during the day than at night, or is that just me?_

When they got into Ajax, Jean told Agnes to take them to the police station. She didn't want to run into her parents quite yet, didn't want Paul and Agnes to see whatever had been painted on her house – and besides, Dana had sounded busy with Cassie over the phone and may not even have called them here yet. Not that the police were likely to do anything about it anyway, but it was worth trying.

Jean walked in first, followed by Agnes and then Paul. A flood of air conditioning washed over them as soon as they entered, and then they stopped, because there was already something going on.

"'Disturbing the peace,' is that what they're calling it?"

The man was facing away from them and laughing. He had a chalky, affronted voice that scratched in the back of his throat. A voice Jean knew. Where had she heard that voice before?

"See, now you're just making things up!" the man cried.

"Will you shut the hell up? Or do I need to add that you're resisting arrest?"

"Kiss my ass, please. I beckon you."

The man was several feet away from the door, with an officer on each side of him, each with a hold on one of his arms. They were hauling him away as he spoke, but apart from his bitter words, he was putting up no resistance.

"Wonder what's up with him," Paul remarked, putting both his hands in his jacket pockets.

Jean felt cold. She started dumbly forward, one step, then another.

"John Lennon?" she said.

She wasn't even sure he would hear her, but at the sound of his name, the man twisted back around to face her. He couldn't have recognized her, but he grinned anyway.

"Sorry, dearie!" He wrenched one arm free long enough to lift a hand and salute her, and then one of the officers grabbed it again, tugging him more harshly away. "Love to talk," said John, "but I'm a bit under arrest at the moment."

Then the two officers led him through a door on the other side of the desk and into some other part of the building, and he was out of sight, just like that.


	4. Chapter 4

"That was him?" Paul nudged Jean. His eyes were wide, and he was staring at the door through which John had just left with the officers. "Jean. That was really him?"

"Sorry," Agnes broke in, "I'm confused. Did you know that guy?"

Jean inhaled sharply; for a moment there she had forgotten to breathe. She was lost for words – it was too much, too much.

"Ma'am?" The officer at the front desk had cocked his head and was watching her. "Can I help you?"

She made her way toward the desk, her mind racing, with Paul and Agnes following her on either side. What now? Did she ask about John or her parents? _Should_ she even ask about her parents?

"Um, there was an act of vandalism," she began, "in my neighborhood."

"I see." The officer plucked a pen from a swirly metal pencil case next to his computer, then rotated in the chair toward a legal pad and began writing something down. "Do you know who committed the vandalism?"

"No," she said faintly.

"What happened, exactly?"

"Someone painted something on my parents' house. A slur, I think."

The pen stopped to perch over the paper, and the officer looked up to watch her. There was something in his eyes that was probing her, something she didn't like. "What type of slur?" he asked cautiously.

She stared at him. A feeling of unease dropped into her stomach and spread there, like ink.

"Um–" Her voice faltered. "Um, I don't know exactly what it said."

"Has a slur ever been used against your family before?"

She knew what he was asking – he wanted to know if they deserved it, if they had earned whatever word they had been called. If they were gay, or foreign, or interracial…Any answer to that question would be a forfeit in and of itself. Why the hell was she even here? Dana was smart – if going to the police was the smart thing to do, then Dana would have done it. Jean could have kicked herself.

"What are you asking?" asked Agnes.

"I think the young lady knows what I'm asking," said the officer, still looking at Jean.

"You know what," she said slowly, "never mind. I overreacted."

The man stared at her. "Any…deviance in your neighborhood," he said, "is probably something the police should be aware of. Don't you think?" His voice was very quiet.

 _Deviance._ "Yes," said Jean, "but I haven't even seen it myself, I probably just overreacted. Thank you. But never mind."

Paul seemed to take this (correctly) as a cue that the subject needed to change. Stepping forward to shift the focus of the conversation away from Jean, he asked the officer, "Pardon me, sir, but who was that man they just led away?"

"I'd like to know that myself," Agnes muttered, but Jean and Paul ignored her.

The officer's gaze slid from Jean to Paul, and then down to the paper he had been writing on. Then he shrugged, crumpled up the paper, and tossed it away. "Disturbing the peace? That guy?"

"Yes."

The officer turned back to his desktop computer, rapidly losing interest in the conversation. "John Weston Lennon," he said dully. "No, Winston – John Winston Lennon. Finished his paperwork just now."

"What's he done?" Paul looked oddly invested, for someone who had never even met John before.

The man glanced up at Paul with only his eyes, his body and face still entirely disinterested. "He a friend of yours?"

Paul looked unsure of what to say, so Jean jumped in. "Friend of a friend," she said quickly.

Jean could tell from the corner of her vision that Agnes was staring at her, but she said nothing. She could explain later – if it was even the best decision to explain at all. She hardly knew Agnes, and for all she knew, the girl would think it was all crazy.

Then again, it was going to be hard to leave here and not want to talk this all over with Paul right away.

"I'm sorry," said the officer, who didn't seem sorry at all as he returned his gaze to his computer screen. "But I can't discuss his crimes with you. It's confidential."

"Confidential?" Paul started in disbelief, but Jean cut him off.

"Can we see him?"

"You're not family," said the officer, "so no."

The conversation felt like it had hit a dead end. Agnes kept trying to make eye contact with Jean, who kept looking at the police officer and pretending not to notice. The officer was paying attention now only to his computer, until he realized a moment later that the three of them were still standing there and lifted his gaze once again, raising his eyebrows this time.

"Was there anything else?" he asked dryly.

A sinking feeling settled into Jean's stomach. "No," she muttered, turning away. Paul looked like he desperately wanted to keep pressing the officer, but she met his eyes first and gave a minute shake of her head. They made their way out of the fluorescent air-conditioned station and into the street, where the sun was beginning to set, spreading orange light over the tops of the buildings.

As soon as they were back in the pickup truck, Agnes turned in the driver's seat to face Jean. "Did you know that guy?" She twisted around to look at Paul in the backseat. " _Both_ of you?"

"Friend of mine," said Paul.

"My ass," said Agnes shortly. "You didn't recognize him, Jean did – but as soon as she did, you seemed like you knew who he was. What's with that? I'm not starting this car until you answer," she added.

Paul and Jean exchanged glances, and then Paul shrugged.

"Hey," he said, "if she thinks you're off your rocker and you lose a friend, it's no skin off my back."

Jean sighed. He was right – why should Paul care if Agnes knew?

Turning back to face Agnes, she said, "He is Paul's friend. They just haven't met yet."

Agnes frowned. "What?"

"For God's sake, Jean," Paul broke in, "you've always got to phrase it in the most cryptic way possible. Look, Agnes," he said, "apparently there's this big band, or there was anyway, back in the sixties, and now the whole world's forgotten about it. I was a part of it, and my friend George, and that fellow in there, too. Jean recognized us, and now she's trying to bring us all back together – or something."

Agnes closed her eyes for a moment, as though she was trying to process it all. When she opened them again, she said, "I assume you've got a valid reason for believing her?"

"She recognized us," Paul said again, "that's three of us now, she knew our names – and she knew this song I'd written that I hadn't ever shown anybody."

Agnes' eyebrows were knitted together. Slowly she said, "You know, she did say something weird, that first day of class – she said she recognized you. And she acted like I should have recognized you, too. Like you were famous."

"Because he was famous," said Jean. "They all were. It's just that – for some reason – I'm the only one who remembers it now."

Agnes shook her head, then looked back over through the windshield, at the lights of the police station across the parking lot. "So that guy–"

"His name's John Lennon," Jean said. "He's one of them. We were looking for him and thought we'd hit a wall, but…that was him."

Agnes blinked. Jean fully expected her to start laughing, or to get angry with them for playing a trick on her, or at least to shake her head again in disbelief. _Something._

Instead Agnes demanded, "So you're just giving up?"

Jean stared at her. "What?"

"The universe has pulled itself together for half a second and done something magical for you," Agnes said plainly. "You find the guy you're looking for, and that's it? You're just going to fold and drive away?"

Jean secretly admired her sudden determination, but she was also a little annoyed. "Well, what am I supposed to do?"

Agnes paused for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. She pushed open her car door and walked around the wide front of the trunk, and when she reached Jean's side, she held out one hand to Jean. In it she held a small chain with the key to the car.

Jean frowned. "What are you–"

"Take it," Agnes said simply. "Go to your parents' house and deal with your crisis. I'll keep watch here and call you when he comes out."

"Agnes, that could be hours. If he even comes out tonight at all."

"So," she said, "I'll get myself some good old police station waiting room coffee."

"I don't think that's a thing," said Paul helpfully, from the backseat.

Jean shook her head. For some reason she still felt resistant to it – taking Agnes' dad's car and leaving her here by herself. And like she had been thinking before, if either one of them was going to find out about her parents, she would rather have it be Agnes than Paul, even though she still couldn't have entirely said why.

"You're not changing my mind," said Agnes. "I'll call you right away, I swear. Now go."

Jean was still hesitating, so Paul pushed open his own door, came around, and grabbed the keys out of her hand. "For Christ's sake," he said, and then slid into the driver's seat himself and shut the door.

Agnes was still smiling, standing there on the pavement outside the car, and Jean still felt lost. "Why?" she asked Agnes, as Paul turned the key in the ignition and she felt the old truck thrum to life beneath and around her.

Agnes shrugged. "I like helping," she said.

Then they pulled away and left her alone in the police station parking lot, waving at them as they went.

It was nearly dark by the time the truck pulled into Jean's driveway, but the word on the garage door was so glaring and thick that Jean felt sure she would have seen it there even if it had been midnight. _Fags._ It was done in red spray paint, and before it had dried some of it had dripped down the door in thin stripes. It looked a little like blood in the darkness.

Jean shut the car door behind her and started heading up the drive, trying to look straight ahead so that she didn't have to see either Paul or the word, but when she reached the front door, Paul hadn't followed her.

She turned. He was standing in the middle of her yard still, staring at the word on the garage door with a strange look on his face, caught somewhere between horror and a failure to understand.

"Come on," she said wearily. Her voice was quiet, but there was no other sound on the block that could have kept him from hearing.

"Are your parents–?"

"Yes."

The answer left her before she was even conscious of thinking it. She was too tired, too tired not to trust Paul. This was Paul, so she trusted him. That was it.

Before she even had time to wonder if she had made a mistake, Paul asked in a hoarse voice, "Who would do something like that?"

"I don't know. Come on."

She pushed open the door without knocking, and at first seemed to find the house empty. The lights were off, and she could hear the heater running, but everything else was still. For a moment, everything looked like it would on a normal night, back in high school, Jean coming home late after being out with friends – the wooden floors all covered in mismatched knotted rugs, the frozen smiles of old black-and-white movie stars lining the walls behind plastic frames, the cat-shaped cuckoo clock ticking on the wall. The house was modestly sized, and it had always seemed to Jean to open up in the darkness – probably because Dana always cleaned everything extensively at the end of the day. The openness now seemed less inviting than usual, and instead eerie, unsure. Then she heard hushed voices coming from down the hallway.

"Mom?" she said, drawing closer, and at once the voices stopped.

Cassie appeared in the opposite doorway, the one that led into the kitchen. She was wearing paint-stained jeans and a loose jacket that had once been red but had somehow faded into orange a little with time – Jean recognized it instantly as Cassie's sleep jacket, her rainy day jacket. But Cassie didn't look sleepy.

"Oh, Jean," said Cassie, and then Jean was there in the doorway with her and they were hugging. Jean breathed in the smell of the jacket, and even though she had only been at college for a few weeks, it suddenly felt like years. Cassie smelled like home, and yet at the same time none of this felt like home at all.

"I'm sorry," whispered Jean.

"It's okay." Pulling away and looking over Jean's shoulder, Cassie asked, "Who's this?"

Paul was standing alone in the hallway, and to his credit, he didn't look awkward at all. "I'm Paul McCartney," he said, and held out his hand for her to shake it.

She did, managing a smile. "It's nice to meet you, Paul. I'm Cassie."

The whole exchange sent a momentary current of something through Jean's heart. She felt warm and sad all at the same time. There had never been a moment up until now when she had wished more strongly that the rest of the world could only remember – and if not the rest of the world, if nobody else, then at least Cassie. Jean liked the Beatles as much as the next average person, but Cassie _loved_ them. The number of times she had talked about Paul to Jean – and now here he was, in the flesh, shaking hands with her, and she didn't even remember.

Cassie led them into the kitchen, where Dana was sitting at the table there, her head leaning into one hand as if she had a headache. At the sight of Jean she stood up, smiling a little, and pulled Jean into a hug.

"This is Jean's friend, Paul," Cassie told Dana.

"It's nice to meet you."

"Likewise," said Paul.

"What were you guys talking about?" asked Jean, lingering near the table but not sitting down. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to sit down. "Before we came in?"

Dana and Cassie exchanged glances, and there was a certain weight there that Jean recognized instantly. Dana, of course, was the one to answer – Dana always took the reins on things like this, things that mattered.

"Nothing really," she said. "Just what we're going to do next."

 _Doesn't sound like nothing to me_ , Jean thought. "What _are_ you going to do next? You're not going to move, are you?" She hoped that they didn't, and then a moment later she hoped that she did. She knew this home, this neighborhood, she loved it here – but she also didn't want to feel anxious all the time, knowing that her parents were living in a place where people knew about them. They were probably thinking the same thing.

"We've been talking about it," said Dana.

"Probably not too far," Cassie added quickly, "just to the other side of town or something like that–"

"Nothing's been decided yet," Dana cut her off. She sounded a little terse.

"Oh," said Jean. She shifted where she was standing. She wasn't really sure what to say, and she knew Paul must have felt even more awkward than she did. "You could move to Cavern City," she said then, brightly. "You'd be closer to me, and it's far enough from here that you wouldn't know as many people."

"I did suggest that," said Cassie, glancing over at Dana.

Dana shook her head. "It's just a lot to think about, Jean. If someone reports us here, it might not matter where we move – they know our names, so changing addresses might not even help."

"So you're going to stay?"

"I don't know. Can we even talk about – who is he again?" she asked, looking straight at Paul but addressing Dana. She sounded exasperated and didn't exactly come across as friendly, but Paul didn't look offended.

"He's a friend," Jean jumped in before Paul could say anything. "We can trust him. Right?" she asked Paul.

"Sure," he said, as though that should have been obvious.

"' _Sure_ ,'" Dana mimicked him. "This is serious, Jean. It's our lives."

"Mom," said Jean, stunned. "I said we could trust him."

"Fine." She waved her off. "But look, I'm sick of being the only person around here who takes these things seriously. It's exhausting."

"Day, we all take it seriously," said Cassie, but she sounded more tired than argumentative.

"I know, but just – Jesus. I don't want to have to be the one pointing out the facts and making the hard decisions all the time. I'm not the bad guy here, I'm just trying to protect you guys and somehow it always seems to come off that way." Her hands were on her hips now and she was looking back and forth between Cassie and Jean; Dana wasn't the type to avoid eye contact when she was confronting people.

Jean didn't want to argue with her, not when she had just gotten here, and Cassie never wanted to argue with anybody, so neither one of them ended up saying anything. After a moment Dana sighed and said, "I'm going to sleep. Goodnight."

"I love you, Mom," said Jean softly.

Dana gave in and pulled her in for a hug. "Thank you for coming." She said it into the hair that fell over Jean's ear.

When they pulled apart, Cassie said, even more quietly than Jean had, "I love you, Dana."

"I love you, too," Dana muttered without turning around, and then she was gone from the room.

Cassie smiled weakly at Jean and Paul. "She'll come around," she said.

"You both will," said Paul unexpectedly.

She looked at him. "What?"

"I mean you'll come around to each other," he said. "Right?"

There was a moment's pause, and then she smiled. Her eyebrows knitted just slightly and she smiled as though she hadn't seen him at first, but did now. "Right," she said. "It was nice meeting you, Paul."

He nodded. Then Cassie hugged Jean goodnight – "Turn off the kitchen lights when you go up, all right?" – and headed out and down the hallway toward her and Dana's room.

Jean realized then that she was hungry, and that in fact neither she nor Paul had had any dinner, so she rummaged around in the fridge until she found some Styrofoam containers of leftover Thai food, then led him out of the kitchen and up the narrow staircase so that they could eat it in her room.

She expected it to feel strange stepping back into it, having been gone at school, but it didn't – perhaps she hadn't been away long enough. It felt nice actually, natural, seeing the squashed twin mattress on the floor in the corner, the wooden dresser with all of the old makeup and nail polish she never used anymore, the dark sea-blue walls covered in her own paintings and sketches. Paul halted a moment in the doorway when they walked in, staring around in awe.

"Jesus, Jean," he said. "These are really good."

She felt herself blushing and tried to stop, annoyed with herself. "Thanks."

"I mean honestly." He paced around the room a little, stopping to gaze at what seemed like every single scrap of drawing paper and canvas. Her charcoal sketches, her watercolors. She had paintings up of every house and apartment building she had ever lived in, of Dana and Cassie and herself and some old friends from her childhood, of random barns and fields she'd caught glimpses of through the car window. "You do everything," said Paul, and his voice was full of reverence. "I had no idea. It's incredible."

She felt a warmth inside of her then, a love not for Paul but for herself, for her room, spurred by Paul. She loved this room. It was where she felt talented and, even more, where her talent was of consequence. The rest of the world, it seemed, could have cared less about art, about drawing and painting and probably Jean herself, but here, this room, was where art was everywhere. She thought suddenly of George's room, of the walls covered in posters of musicians, and wondered if he felt the same way.

"Thanks," she said again, meaning it a little more this time, and then she sat down on one end of the mattress, leaving room so that he could do the same. He sat down across from her and she opened the Styrofoam box, handing him a fork, and together they started in on the day-old pad Thai.

"Are your parents going to be okay?" Paul asked her, after they had been eating for a few minutes and the gnawing feeling of hunger had subsided.

Jean shrugged. "They always are, I guess," she said. "They're both pretty freaked out, I think, and since they've got different personalities it comes out in different ways. But they love each other. They'll be fine."

"Do they fight a lot normally?"

She thought about that for a moment as she chewed. "As much as anybody," she said finally, once she had swallowed. "Like I said, different personalities, so they're bound to clash a little bit every now and then. Mostly, though, no. Cassie doesn't like fighting, and Dana thinks it's a waste of time except when she really cares about something."

"That's a good perspective, I reckon," said Paul.

"What about your parents?" she asked. "Do they fight?"

He laughed. "As much as anybody," he said, echoing her words. "But I had a good childhood, you know, it'd be ridiculous to complain."

That was good to hear. She realized now that she didn't know anything about any of the Beatles' backgrounds – if they had grown up rich or poor, if they had any siblings, what their parents were like. She and Paul talked for a while over the leftovers, trading off stories about their families and friends and their lives growing up, and sometime after midnight they both started drifting off. It wasn't until Paul's eyes started to droop in the middle of his own mumbled sentence that it occurred to Jean that maybe she should track down some blankets and make him his own makeshift bed on the floor, but she was so tired and it was so dark and there was room enough for the both of them on the full, anyway, and Paul didn't seem to mind. A moment later he was completely asleep, lying on his back on one side of the mattress with his head still tilted in her direction.

She hesitated just half a moment further, but then the urge to sleep overpowered her and she gave up, laying her own head down on her pillow. If Paul had any problem with sharing a bed with her, he could take it up with her in the morning.

In fact, Paul never made it to morning. He jolted awake several hours later, inexplicably energized and thinking about Agnes.

His first thought was actually that, fuck, he had fallen asleep in the middle of talking to Jean – but then he saw Jean lying next to him on the mattress, facing away from him, her upper body lifting and falling in a steady rhythm as she breathed. The room was dark – maybe one of them had turned off the light at some point, or maybe it hadn't been on to begin with. Either way, he moved slowly as he got up from the mattress, careful not to make any extra sounds so as not to wake Jean, feeling his way around in the dark until at last his fingers closed around the doorknob.

They had never heard back from Agnes. They had left her there at night, with no car and possibly no money, unless she'd had some on her already. And no food. He felt even guiltier remembering how quickly he and Jean had gone through that pad Thai, not having had dinner before they'd driven to Ajax. As he padded quietly down the stairs in his socks, he wondered whether it would be rude to grab some food now from the fridge or something, to take there for her, but decided against it. He didn't want to make a bunch of noise in the kitchen, and they could easily get food somewhere as soon as he picked her up.

He had seen Jean leave the key ring on a hook by the door in the entry, so he grabbed it now on his way out, closing the door quietly behind him. Then he jogged down the front steps and slid into the driver's seat of the pickup truck. It wasn't until he turned the key in the ignition and saw the time light up on the dashboard that he realized what time it was: just after four-thirty in the morning.

There was no way she would still be there, he thought as he pulled back out of the driveway. She must have gone somewhere else by now. Nobody just loiters in a police station parking lot until four-thirty in the morning. Still, he felt he had to check anyway – it was all he could do, really, and he felt this strange feeling of anticipation, like something was going to happen and somehow he knew it was important that he be there. He couldn't have fallen back asleep if he'd stayed in Jean's room; he knew even now that he would have just laid there in the darkness, shifting around, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what it was he was missing.

He thought there was no one in the parking lot when he first pulled in, but then he saw her, sitting on the curb next to another figure in a green hooded jacket. When he parked the car and got out, he saw that it was another girl, younger than them, with two light brown braids coming down on both sides of her shoulders. They were lumpy and had hair sticking out of them at random angles; it was as though the girl had been sleeping, and had only just woken up. Her skin was very clear and she wasn't smiling.

"Hey," yawned Agnes as Paul walked toward them. She didn't stand up. "He hasn't come out yet. Thought you'd be sleeping."

"I thought _you'd_ be sleeping," he shot back. "Why didn't you call us? We didn't mean to leave you here all night."

She shrugged. "It hasn't been that bad. I've got company."

Paul looked at the girl in the green jacket, who had been staring haggardly up at him and showed no sign of wanting to speak. "Hi," he said doubtfully. "I'm Paul."

She nodded once, letting her head hang slightly forward and then picking it back up again. Her look said, _I'm done with this bullshit_ , and nothing else. Then she reached into one of her jacket pockets, pulled out a small index card that had yellowed along its crease, and handed it to Paul.

He unfolded it. In hand-scrawled black pen it read, _PAUL MCCARTNEY._

He looked at her and frowned. "Did Agnes tell you?"

The girl didn't answer, and Agnes shrugged, as if to say, _Don't look at me._

"Who are you?" Paul asked the girl.

The girl looked over at Agnes, who handed him another index card: _PILGRIM._

"Pilgrim?" he said. "That's your name?"

"'S what I've been calling her," said Agnes. "She's not very informative."

"Do you know her?"

"No. She's nice, though. Keeps me awake."

"How's that?" asked Paul, again doubtfully. So far he hadn't seen the girl do anything other than sit there and pull out an index card.

Again Agnes shrugged.

"Okay," said Paul, deciding to give up for the moment, "well, I came to relieve you, Agnes. I can't sleep anyway, and you must be exhausted, so I thought we'd switch places. You can take the truck back to Jean's house and sleep there, and I'll keep watch here for John." Glancing sidelong at the other girl – Pilgrim? – for a moment, he asked offhandedly, "Do you know John, too?"

She cocked her head and gave him a look that could only be described as flat and fed up, as if to say, _Are you fucking kidding me?_ The "fucking" included. Everything about her exuded teenage apathy, the exact sentiment of _why-did-you-people-wake-me-up._ It struck Paul as a little uncalled for.

"It would be nice to get some sleep," said Agnes thoughtfully. She looked perfectly awake, but exhausted at the same time; her eyes were red-rimmed and baggy. "Are you sure you wouldn't mind?"

"I'm here, aren't I?"

She looked over at Pilgrim. "Would _you_ mind?"

That same flat look was still in the girl's eyes. She gave no answer, verbal or otherwise.

Agnes sighed. "All right," she said, getting to her feet. He handed her the keys, and she clapped him on the back as she passed him, walking slowly to the car. When she turned it back on, the headlights startled Paul, but not Pilgrim, who made no effort even to shield her eyes.

As the pickup truck rumbled out of the parking lot, Paul turned toward the girl, knowing there was some question he wanted to ask but having no idea how to phrase it, but she was standing up and brushing off her jeans. She put both hands in her jacket pockets and started walking away across the darkened parking lot.

"Hey," he said, "where are you going?"

One hand emerged from the jacket, and she turned around only briefly, just to flick another folded index card in his direction. He stepped forward to pick it up off the grainy asphalt and unfolded it, wondering whether she would ever want any of these cards back, and read:

 _JOHN LENNON._

"Hey," he shouted, looking up, but she was already gone.

He sat down after twenty minutes of pacing, and about an hour later he began to get bleary-eyed. Cars rolled one by one into the parking lot and officers headed inside, but he kept off to the side, and nobody asked him who he was or what he was doing. Lights came on up and down the street, and gradually the sky rose from its deep black into a flushed dark blue, and then the sun was visible all at once through distant suburban trees and cracks between the buildings, and the air was cold and pink. Paul's head was numb and he was shivering, and the world was beginning to blur when the door finally opened and John Lennon came out.

He was with a woman – not an old woman, but she looked much older than she was because she had pulled all of her hair into a very tight bun behind her head. She was dressed nicely and scowling, steering John toward an Audi parked near where Paul was sitting.

Paul got up slowly, waiting for his limbs to reawaken, as though he and John knew one another and therefore he expected John to stop and recognize him. As though he had been waiting, and now the two of them were meeting up as planned.

And John did stop, as soon as he reached him.

The two of them stared at one another. John didn't look tired, despite having spent the night in the police station, but he did look a little amused. Paul blinked hard against the early morning sunlight, his eyes thick and gummy and his mouth tasting sour, and tried not to think about what he must have looked like.

"Hello," he said.

John looked him over. "Hello yourself."

The woman had stopped walking, too, but for her it was more a matter of confusion. "We haven't got any money," she told Paul briskly, and started trying to tug John away toward the Audi. He didn't move.

"I don't want any money," said Paul tonelessly.

He knew now was the moment that he was supposed to explain everything to John, to tell him about Jean and the Beatles and George and whoever the hell the fourth one of them was. To say, Come with me, trust me, we're going to be brilliant.

But for some reason, what he said instead was simply, "D'you play the guitar?"

John stared at him for a moment.

Then he smiled. An open smile, with his teeth and his eyes and his spirit. A smile that said, Come with me, trust me, we're going to be brilliant.

"I'm probably better than you," John warned him.

Paul grinned. "At talking, maybe. But I can play." It wasn't the best comeback in the world, but he was only just waking up, after all.

"You're a kid," said John.

"You're a kid, too."

"I'm older. I can tell. Plus I've been to prison now," John added.

"Jail," Paul corrected him. "They're different."

John grinned.

"For God's sake, John," the woman insisted, "do I need to take the guitar away?"

"All _right_ , Mimi!" He sounded annoyed, but he extended his right hand to Paul. "I'm John," he said.

Paul shook it. "I'm Paul."

"John," the woman started again.

" _Mimi!_ " Shaking his head with irritation, he dug a phone from his pocket and handed it to Paul. "Well, don't just stand there," he said.

Paul keyed in his number and then handed it back.

John glanced over him one last time while he pulled open the passenger door of the Audi. Mimi had already closed her own door and was waiting inside with a look of serious impatience, drumming her long fingernails against the steering wheel.

"You're too young," said John, "honestly."

"And you're too cocky," Paul replied. "Honestly."

John shook his head again as he shut the car door, but he was also smiling, just a little bit, as the car started up and pulled away. He was trying not to show it and he was actually very good at not showing it, but Paul could tell easily – more than easily, reflexively. He hadn't known he could ever feel this comfortable reading somebody he'd never met before.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, he felt alive. The Audi pulled out of the parking lot and began disappearing down the street, and Paul was alone in the lot and he felt awake and relieved and electric. He had been thinking about everything Jean had said about him and John, about the songs they were supposed to write together someday and the successes they were supposed to have, but it wasn't even the songs and the fame and the concerts he was thinking about right now. It was that feeling when he and John had first made eye contact, when they'd shaken hands. Like he had existed in two places at once, and like someone new he hadn't known about before now existed inside of him, too. He knew almost nothing about John – in a few ways he even disliked him already – but he also felt like he had found some important new link within himself, nothing real yet, just some small possibility – like by meeting John, by allowing that possibility, he had accomplished some goal he'd been speeding toward for years but had never even known he'd had. It felt like a triumph.

He pulled out his own phone now as the Audi disappeared into a land of stoplights and strip malls. The morning was crisp and pale, the sky was watercolors. He had to get back to Cavern to tell George about this, to play the guitar, to play the guitar, to feel the neck of the guitar and the strings under his fingers. He dialed Jean's number and took in a deep breath of clean air and kept breathing, in and in and in, filling his lungs with morning while he waited for the sun to arrive.


	5. Chapter 5

_"_ _John had his thing, and Paul had his, and together there were two different things all together. But they fit." –Billy Preston_

"I can't believe you didn't wake me," Jean kept saying. "I can't _believe_ you."

"Relax," said Paul, "it's not like I knew he was going to come out then. I was thinking about Agnes – who doesn't seem to mind any of this nearly as much as you do, by the way."

They were making the brief road trip back into Cavern City, with Agnes in the driver's seat. They had stopped for lunch on the way out of Ajax, and now it was early afternoon and Paul and Jean were both feeling awake enough to bicker with each other about John Lennon.

"I'd be a little more sour about it, seeing as how I was the one who waited up for him all night," Agnes admitted, "but I don't really know anything about him, so it's harder to care."

"You'll meet him anyway, I'm sure," Paul told Jean.

"Has he texted you yet?"

"No. But he didn't exactly strike me as the text-you-right-away type."

"Three day rule?" she said dryly.

"Oh, shut up."

In spite of the crossness, though, he did seem happy, underneath everything. Jumpier, lighter. He was looking out the window the whole time they were speaking, automatically arguing with her but not paying true attention to the conversation, not really.

And it made Jean happy, too. She had wanted to be there to meet John, sure, but what was most important was that Paul met him, and now he had.

 _Three down_ , she thought. _One to go_.

It was a Friday and both Jean and Paul had afternoon classes, but neither of them wanted to go, so Paul directed Agnes to George's neighborhood. After she'd pulled up in the drive behind the school bus, he said, "You can come in, if you want. George is plenty friendly, you'd like him."

She hesitated. "I – I would," she said, "but I really need to get the car back. My dad'll be wanting it."

Jean had forgotten all about the fact that the truck wasn't really Agnes', but her father's. "Tell him we said thanks, okay? I don't know what else we would've done."

Agnes nodded.

Jean hadn't noticed when they were driving, but Agnes looked very pale, almost sickly. After coming back to Jean's house, she had slept pretty late into the morning, but no doubt she had still been deprived of a few hours. She hadn't talked for a lot of the drive, and now there was something in her face like restrained worry, or even panic.

"Are you okay?" Jean asked her, leaning back into the car. Paul was already up the drive, almost to George's front door.

"I'm fine," Agnes said. "Tell George I said hi. Or not, you know, since I don't know him."

"I'll tell him," said Jean. "Talk later?"

Agnes nodded, and then she put the big truck in reverse and pulled away, out of the drive and onto the street.

Inside, they didn't have to look far to find George, who was baking in the kitchen. He was a very neat person – Jean had noticed that before, in his room, and she could see it again now in the way he had arranged all of the ingredients on one counter, careful not to spread the mess to the rest of the kitchen. He was dressed for school, his shirt even tucked into his pants, but it was barely one o'clock and here he was at home, baking. Carl Perkins was blaring from the record player; Jean had heard muffled traces of it from outside, and the volume skyrocketed as soon as they opened the door and came in.

Paul didn't look at all surprise. "Hi," he called to George, but his voice was drowned out and George didn't turn around from the counter.

Paul walked up behind him and shouted in his ear: "HI!"

George turned to face him, grinning pleasantly. "Hi!" Then his gaze landed on Jean, and he exclaimed something else, but Jean couldn't hear.

"What?"

"I said it's you again, hello!"

Paul had walked over to the record player, which was on a small wooden table in the adjacent living room, and he turned it down now to a more comfortable volume. "He used to play it louder," he told Jean, "but the damn neighbors kept calling the cops on him."

"I didn't know record players _could_ go up louder than that."

"You'd be surprised," said George.

Paul walked back over into the kitchen and sat down at one of the tall chairs on the other side of the counter, and Jean did the same, watching George begin tipping a dry white mixture into a bowl of what looked like thick brownish cream. "No bus today?"

"Well, I did go," said George, "but Bernie was driving. We're afraid the board's onto us, y'see, so we've got to cover our tracks every once in a while."

"You went to school?"

"Just got home."

Jean looked at her watch, just to be sure. "It's one-oh-five."

"I never said I was a model of perfection, did I?" He looked at her, then from her over to Paul. "Anyway, where have you all been? I'm not the only one who's supposed to be in school, you know."

"We drove to Ajax," said Paul, before Jean could say anything. "You know that Lennon fellow we were looking for?"

George looked up, his posture straightening and his whisk pausing in the bowl. "You found him?"

"Yeah, and can you guess where?"

"Ajax," said George swiftly, in a bet-you'll-never-guess-how-I-knew sort of tone.

"County jail," said Paul.

George raised his eyebrows. "Our man's a criminal? What did he do?"

"Funny you should ask that," Jean said crossly, "because Paul didn't."

"It didn't come up in the natural course of conversation," Paul said, speaking mainly to George, who had resumed his whisking but was still paying rapt attention to the both of them. "But he's all right. I wouldn't call him friendly exactly, and he's a little older than us. He's kind of cocky."

"Remind me again why we want to be friends with him," said George, smiling a little.

Jean opened her mouth, ready to defend John to the both of them, but to her surprise Paul spoke first. "Just trust me," he said. "He's good."

"You didn't even hear him play," Jean heard herself say, more out of bemusement than skepticism.

"Just trust me," Paul repeated.

George bent down to pull a burnt-metal baking sheet from one of the cabinets, and started taking handfuls of dough, rolling them into little balls, and arranging them on the sheet. "You know," he said, "if the two of you are going to want any of these, you've got to contribute a little."

They obliged. Jean liked baking, had always enjoyed doing it, especially with other people (baking with Cassie in particular was always the most fun, although Cassie always left the kitchen looking like a tornado had hit it), but she had never been very good at it. Luckily, by this point George had done all of the hard work, and all she needed to do was try to keep her balls of dough from being too big or too lumpy. The dough held together well and left her hands feeling sticky and smooth.

"Paul," George said suddenly, "you're doing it all wrong."

Jean frowned and looked up, but then she saw what Paul was doing: rather than making balls, he was shaping the dough on his side of the metal tray into the figure of what looked like a stick man.

"I beg your pardon?" Paul sounded offended.

Jean thought George was going to criticize the fact that Paul was making a dough-man at all, but he didn't. "His head," said George, "you just gave him a random lump of dough. The chocolate chips are there for a reason, here, look–"

He stepped over beside Paul and momentarily took over, reshaping the dough so that it looked less like a random ball and more like the head of a person, peering up at them through twin chocolate chip eyes.

"There's an art to it, you see," he explained to Paul.

Paul crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the kitchen counter. "Oh, is there?"

"Yes. It's very subtle, see, so I wouldn't expect–"

"Oh, wouldn't you?"

"Not from you, no, I wouldn't."

Paul grinned.

"I'm sorry," said George, "but when something's got to be said, it's got to be said."

Paul flicked a fingerful of dough into George's face. It landed on his left cheek, a mere couple of inches away from his eye. George didn't wait an instant before retaliating with a somewhat bigger wad of dough, which smacked Paul right between the eyes, on the bridge of his nose, as if George had been aiming for a target.

That set them off. Jean doubled over in laughter despite herself, and as he laughed Paul scooped another hand into the half-full bowl of dough, aiming for George's shirt this time. After a few rounds of this one or another of them hit Jean, who had no choice but to join in, flicking sticky bundles of chocolate chips left and right until the three of them had nearly emptied the bowl.

When they had finished, the kitchen area around them was spattered with dough, from the counters to the cabinets to Jean and George and Paul themselves. Paul had a gob of it stuck in his hair (yet somehow, even despite this, the bastard still managed to look frustratingly good), and there was a line of flour skewed across one of George's shoulders. They had used up maybe a third of the dough. Jean hadn't seen a kitchen this out of sorts since Cassie had tried taking over Thanksgiving a few years back.

Paul looked around in disapproval. "George," he asked, "do you always keep your kitchen this messy?"

"Don't make me start again," George warned him, but he was smiling.

Jean didn't see Agnes again for a few days after that. She was absent the next day in Intro to World Politics, and when Jean texted her to ask where she was and if she wanted to meet up for dinner, she didn't respond. Jean wanted to seek her out at her dorm to see what was going on, but over the course of the next couple of days she kept getting swept up in things Paul and George were doing.

She was trying to avoid meeting George along his bus route with Paul these days, partly because the cab fare to his neighborhood was expensive and partly because she was determined to attend at least a few of her afternoon classes this semester, but somehow most afternoons still seemed to find her either at George's house or in Paul's dorm. She met George's sister, Louise, and his brothers, Harry and Peter, in passing – they always seemed to be coming and going somewhere or another – and his parents, who were miles friendlier and more welcoming than Jean would have expected from anyone. Sometimes they baked or played board games or drove around town, but far more often than not, an evening would find Paul and George huddled together over their guitars, writing a song while Jean sketched quietly on the other side of the room. She didn't mind not being involved – in fact, she liked it, as it gave her space to focus on her art. Watching Paul and George sitting here, creating something new and interesting with every minute they spent together, it would have felt foolish not to try and create something of her own. She had never had friends who'd understood so fully the need to make art before.

The day after finding John in Ajax, Jean was walking across campus and wondering whether she ought to go by Agnes' dorm when her phone rang. It was Cassie.

"She came around, Jean," she said. She sounded fresh, flushed, excited. "Dana did, she agreed. We're moving to Cavern City."

Jean wasn't sure whether she should feel excited or skeptical. "She did? I thought–"

"Yeah, you know, me too, but we talked it over a lot, and we think it's a good idea. It'll be nice to be so close."

When Jean met up with them at their new Cavern apartment later that night, Dana did seem a little tense, but then again, tense was Dana's resting state of being. Jean decided not to think too much of it. She recruited Paul and George to meet them there and help paint the walls, which they did with a lot more vigor and zeal than she had been expecting. Cassie in particular was instantly charmed as soon as she saw the school bus pull up and park on the street block outside, and the subsequent few hours of semi-productive paint-flinging only cemented her approval.

"I like them," she told Jean while the two of them were alone at one point in the kitchen, melting sugar in a frying pan to make homemade caramel. They were going to drizzle it over a bowl of popcorn that waited, freshly made, on the counter. "Barring the fact that they're not very good painters, I like them."

Apparently, when painting a wall, the thing to do is to paint in neat rows so that everything looks smooth and blended once it's finally dried. Conversely, George painted in great sprawling spirals, taking occasional detours to outline little scenes carried out by stick figure people, and Paul had seemed to delight in trying to find every possible brushstroke, from sideways streaks to straight-on blotches. It had taken them a while, but they'd gotten the wall covered. They ended up taking the caramel popcorn and watching an old movie on the floor (as there was no furniture in the apartment yet), and all spending the night there. George dropped Paul and Jean off at their classes in his bus the next morning.

It was later that same day that Jean saw Agnes. She was walking down the sidewalk near the Square with her back to Jean, but Jean recognized in an instant her backpack and short, cotton-candy hair.

"Agnes!"

If she heard her, she didn't turn around.

"Hey, Agnes!"

She started jogging to catch up to her, and as she got closer she realized that Agnes had actually started walking a little faster since the first time she'd called her name.

When Jean reached her at last and stopped her in her tracks, she saw why.

Agnes had an enormous black eye. The term "black eye" even seemed inaccurate in implying that it was confined at all to her eye, when really the bruise seemed to take up almost the entire left side of her face. At the top of her forehead, near her scalp, was a deep ugly cut that stretched back into her hair, as though she had hit her head against something.

Jean felt her breath leave her for a moment, and her heart dropped into her chest. "Agnes," she said, lost for words.

"Hi," said Agnes, not looking directly at her.

"What happened? Who…What happened?"

"Nothing." Agnes kept walking, and Jean fell into step alongside her without thinking.

Jean was so stricken that for a moment she couldn't think at all; there was nothing in her head but the image of Agnes' face, bruised and awful. She felt even worse thinking about how she had wanted to go to Agnes' dorm the day before, but had been too busy throwing paint around and eating caramel popcorn with Paul and George and her parents. She had had a fine couple of days – but what the hell had Agnes been going through?

Then she remembered the last time she had seen Agnes, and the pale, panicked look on her face as she'd driven away in her father's truck. Almost as though she had expected something like this, something terrible.

"Agnes," she said quietly, "did your dad do this? For taking the truck?"

Again Agnes didn't look at her. "Doesn't matter. It's done now."

"It does matter," said Jean. "It matters to me."

"Not to me. Honestly."

"Well, it must, if you haven't been answering my texts for the last two days."

"Because I knew you'd react like this," said Agnes finally, turning to face her. There was something in her expression that looked sad, but also strangely at peace, in tune with the sadness. "You'd try to treat it like some big deal. Of course I knew it was going to happen, but I made the decision anyway. I knew, but I wanted to help, so I did it. It's that simple."

Jean thought again of George's bus, of the fact that really the truck hadn't been their only option at all. "But if we'd known–"

"Jean," Agnes cut her off. She was looking at her plaintively, with an expression that said, _I love you and I'm being honest here, so just listen._ "I appreciate the concern, truly. You're a good friend and I thank you for it. But being concerned won't help. My life isn't going to change. If I freaked out every time my dad went off on me, I'd never have a normal moment."

Jean stared back at her, trying to decipher her face and the things she was saying but failing. She didn't understand that. She couldn't pick and choose what parts of her life to care about and be impacted by, especially not if one of those things was being hit by her own parent. She couldn't see herself getting used to something like that, no matter how many times it happened.

"So he does that a lot?" she asked finally. "This wasn't the first time?"

Agnes shrugged. "Won't be the last, either."

"What about – I mean, does he hit Silas, too?"

Agnes opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, their conversation was interrupted by the sight of Paul coming toward them up the sidewalk. He was wearing a lopsided cap and a button-down shirt and jeans, and he was running.

"Hey, Jean! Hi, Agnes!"

He made it a few more steps before the pocket of his backpack folded over and several books spilled out across the sidewalk – apparently he had forgotten to pull up the zipper. He stumbled to a halt, crouched down and hurriedly scooped them back inside, and then jogged the rest of the way up to Jean and Agnes.

"He texted me." The words spilled out of his mouth instantly, almost before he'd even reached them, and then he was about to say more but was stopped at the sight of Agnes. "He – what – Agnes, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," said Agnes.

Jean had barely even processed what Paul had said, and internally hoped for a moment that he would leave. She wasn't sure how much of this Agnes wanted to share with Paul…But then again, she wasn't sure how much if it Agnes wanted to share with Jean herself, either. And Agnes _had_ seemed like she'd wanted to abandon the topic of conversation. Maybe it was a good thing that Paul was here now to change it.

"Are you sure?" asked Paul.

"Tripped on the stairs," said Agnes. "Who texted you?"

"What?"

"You said someone texted you," said Agnes patiently. "Who?"

Only now did this piece of information really reach Jean. "Wait," she said, looking from Agnes over to Paul. "John? Did John text you?"

The smile had left Paul's face as soon as he'd seen Agnes, but a hint of it flickered back now, if a little uncertainly. "Yeah," he said. "He wants to meet up. I'm on my way to my dorm right now to get my guitar, then I'm catching a cab to his house."

"A cab?" Jean repeated. "To Ajax?"

Paul shook his head. "He doesn't live in Ajax. He was just there for the night, it turns out – he lives in Cavern, not fifteen minutes from here."

"He was right under our noses this whole time," Agnes interjected, in a deep, exaggerated detective's voice.

"Hang on," said Jean, already reaching toward her pocket for her phone, "I'll call George–"

"No," said Paul suddenly, "I'll – I'll text him later. I think I ought to go alone. Don't want to overwhelm him." As he spoke he kept walking, already moving past Jean and Agnes.

Jean felt her shoulders slump. "I _still_ have to wait to meet John Lennon?"

Paul shrugged, but he was grinning. "Sorry!" he called, picking up his pace a little to start jogging away again.

"Are you going to tell him?" she called after him, certainly loud enough for him to hear, but he didn't turn around.

She turned back to face Agnes, who had pulled a peach out of somewhere in her backpack and was taking her first bite into it. She wasn't sure what to do now – as far as Paul and John went, it sounded like she just needed to await further developments, and in terms of her conversation with Agnes, she knew they couldn't go back to what they had been talking about before.

For some reason, though, despite herself, she still felt like she should say something. "Promise you'll tell me," she said quietly, before she could stop herself. "If you need anything, or if anything gets – you know – bad. You can always stay with me."

Agnes looked at her. "Thanks," she said, and Jean could tell that she meant it. "Really."

Jean nodded.

"Now," said Agnes, "no offense, but can we talk about something else?"

Jean gave a small smile. "Sure," she said. "Could you go for some bubble tea?"

"Always," said Agnes impassively around the peach.

As they started off down the sidewalk, Jean stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets. It was late September now, and Cavern was in that pleasant, still mildly warm phase that allowed and encouraged warm clothes but didn't require them. It was Jean's favorite part of the year – leaves coloring through and starting to come down, and getting to wear her favorite clothes, light boots, long jeans and thin jackets.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Agnes.

Jean shook her head. "I'm just…impatient, I guess," she said finally. "Part of me is just happy that any of this is happening at all, and excited that it's come this far. But it's also the very beginning, and if it's going to happen at all close to how it happened last time, there's so much great stuff ahead…" _Sgt. Pepper_ and _Revolver_ flashed through her mind, and _Rubber Soul_ , and the movies and the concerts and the fans, the travel, the few interviews she'd seen of them on tape, all four of them laughing and talking so naturally, like friends. But she looked at Agnes, finishing off the peach and looking understanding but still generally blank, and of course she couldn't say any of that. "And now that I've got the ball rolling," she said at last, "there's nothing for me to do but sit back and wait. And hope we're able to find Ringo soon," she added as an afterthought. "I just feel inactive. And now John's here, we've found him, but Paul's right, we shouldn't overwhelm him and I don't want to get in the way – I mean after all, when they first met in real life it's not like there was some strange girl in the room talking about fate."

"This is real life," Agnes reminded her.

"Right. I just meant–" She gave up. "You know what I meant. It's just frustrating."

Agnes reached up to wipe a line of peach juice from her chin. "Those rock stars," she said reproachfully to Jean. "You introduce one to another, and suddenly they can't be bothered with anybody else."

John's house was nice – more so than any of Paul's other friends' houses, and more so than Paul had honestly been expecting. It was set apart from the other houses in its neighborhood and sat comfortably on the corner of Reed and Menlove, in a neighborhood that wasn't fancy exactly but definitely ranked among the more polished parts of Cavern. The yard was well trimmed and cared for, and there were several windows facing the street from the first and second floors, all stacked together in rows, some with plants in the sills. It was the first thing Paul noticed when he saw the house from the street.

He paid the cabdriver and made his way across the yard. It struck him that this seemed like one of those houses where you're not supposed to walk on the grass and should really take the sidewalk around instead, but he didn't think of it until he was already halfway across the lawn, and by that point he didn't care.

He knocked a few times, hoping it would be John who answered. It wasn't.

Mimi glared down at him over the rims of her spectacles. "You're that idiot who was panhandling outside the police station, aren't you?" she said. She had opened the door maybe halfway, just enough for her to fill up all of the space between it and the frame, blocking his way inside. As though he were about to barrel past her without asking.

"I'm not an idiot, ma'am," said Paul, with as much respect as he could muster in the moment – for despite the woman's seemingly permanent scowl, there was still something about her that he thought he ought to respect. "And I wasn't panhandling."

"Only an idiot would panhandle outside a police station."

"I wasn't–" He stopped midsentence, seeing John trot down the stairs behind her.

"Hullo, Paul," said John, paying Mimi just enough attention to pry the doorknob away from her and open the door widely enough for Paul to come inside.

"Hullo, John."

He thought it would be rude to walk straight past Mimi when she didn't seem very welcoming, but John beckoned him in impatiently, so he stepped inside anyway, awkwardly sidling his guitar case past her as he did. She looked him over as he came in, and for the first time he felt overly conscious of his untucked shirt and dirt-flecked old cap.

"John," she said, "you should really be focusing on cleaning up your act in school, not associating with all of these new…sorts." She said it straight to John, as though Paul wasn't even standing there.

"I know he's not on the list, ma'am, but he's with me," John said in some mocking tone that wasn't his own, not even glancing back at her as he hurried back up the stairs. Paul understood he was meant to follow and did, thankful to be out of the line of fire that was Mimi's eyesight.

"Don't mind Mimi," said John as he led Paul up the stairs and into his room. It had posters of old musicians on the walls, just like George's room, but it was bigger than George's room and less organized. The posters were patchier in the way they were arranged, as though some had been moved around or taken down over the years, and the bed was unmade, with an acoustic guitar resting on top of it. John sat leisurely down and picked up the guitar immediately, and Paul sat across from him in a chair in front of John's desk, setting his own case down on the floor and reaching down to undo its latches.

"She always like that?" he asked conversationally.

"Like what?"

Surprised that he'd asked, Paul hesitated. "You know–"

"I don't know," said John. "That's my aunt you're talking about."

Paul frowned, but then he saw something in John's eyes that locked it all back into place for him. It was a joke.

Lifting his guitar carefully out of its case, he asked, "So she's not your mother, then?"

"Well, she can't be both, last I checked."

"Where's your mum?"

"What's it to you?" said John, staring at him. "I don't even know who you are."

Paul blinked. He had forgotten – forgotten that John had barely any context even for knowing him, that all of these questions would probably seem prying. "Right," he said. "Right, sorry, I just – my mum died a few years ago, so I was just – I was just wondering."

John stared at him for a moment longer, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he went back to tuning his guitar, turning the knobs slowly and delicately, one by one. "She's fine," he said. "Lives a few blocks down from here. I stay there sometimes on the weekends."

"We tried calling all the Lennons in the area," said Paul, almost without thinking. "Couldn't find her or your father or anyone."

"Mimi's last name is Smith." His hands had paused on the guitar, and now he looked up at Paul again and frowned. "Are you going to explain all of this, then? Why you were looking for me?"

"Right." Paul cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. This was the part he hadn't been looking forward to – since getting here, he had started to wonder whether it might have been better after all to bring along Jean and George, just so that he'd have someone around to back up what he was saying. "I've got this friend, see, this girl Jean."

"The girl who recognized me," said John.

"At the police station. Yeah."

"I figured I must've gone out with her or something, but she didn't look familiar." He frowned. " _Did_ I go out with her?"

"No," said Paul quickly. "No, you've never met. She…" He trailed off, realizing suddenly that he had absolutely no idea how to phrase this.

"What?" John grinned. "Don't just sit there slack-jawed. If we've never met, how did she know who I was?"

"It wasn't just you," said Paul. "She recognized me, too, the first day of college. It was really weird, actually. And she knew I was from Liverpool."

"You're from Liverpool?" John perked up a little, his shoulders straightening. "So am I!"

"Yeah." He knew John was probably expecting him to be surprised, but he couldn't summon up more than a smile. "Yeah, that's part of it."

"Part of what?"

Paul shifted a little, adjusting the guitar over his legs. "Jean told me we used to all know each other – me and you and my friend George, and this fourth fellow we haven't found yet. We were in a band together. In another lifetime or something, she said it was in the sixties. We had the same names back then and we looked the same and everything, and everyone in the world knew who we were and remembered us – until the day she met me, and then when she tried telling other people no one seemed to remember."

John was grinning with delight, as though he had told a good joke. "You're pulling my leg."

Paul gave a small, nervous laugh. "It'd all make a lot more sense to me if I were, trust me."

"So we're the same people. Reincarnated or something."

"That's what she said."

"What about the other people? Our – y'know, our original selves." He said "original selves" with his eyebrows raised, an element of playfulness still in his voice.

"I don't think I asked," said Paul. He had finished tuning his guitar and started playing it idly now, sliding his fingers absently up and down scales. He did this often when he started playing to get reacquainted with the instrument, to slip back in. "Dead, I suppose. We'd have all been old by now."

It was a weird thought, but one he was surprised hadn't occurred to him before. Looking across the room at John, he tried picturing an elderly version of him and couldn't.

"Huh," said John. "D'you know any Elvis?"

Paul blinked. "Sorry?"

"Elvis." The look in his eyes was as though he was waiting for Paul to not know, waiting for him to slip. "As in–"

"Presley, yeah. Sorry," he said again. "Is that it? 'Huh'? You don't want to demand some proof, or kick me out for being mad, or–"

"It doesn't matter," said John.

"What?" How could it not matter?

He shrugged and said it again, simply. "It doesn't matter. Before, if this is all to be believed, we were the same people as we are now. Same spirits, same things we care about, right? You were into the guitar before you ever met Jean, and if you hadn't met her you'd still have been into it anyway, right?"

"Right," said Paul slowly.

"And I'm into it anyway, too. It doesn't matter if we met each other before, and if we're meeting each other now because of fate or magic or whatever the hell else. We've met now. If music is what we do, then we may as well fucking do it, isn't that right?" He was still wearing that same grin, the grin that seemed to be testing Paul. Waiting for him.

And as much as Paul hadn't completely understood at first, it made sense. What did it matter if they had known each other before, in some previous life? They were here now. They were back now.

Starting right now, it was all forward.

"It is," said Paul. He could feel a smile starting across his own face. "That is right."

John was looking at him expectantly. "So?"

"So?"

"Elvis? D'you know anything?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah." The idea of not knowing Elvis was ridiculous to him.

"Chuck Berry?"

The smile widened. "I love Chuck Berry."

"So play something," said John.

Paul raised his eyebrows. He played the first thing he thought of, which of course was "Johnny B. Goode" – he always got into the song when he played it, singing included, and John looked so pleased as he was playing that he joined in a bit in the middle, playing his guitar along under Paul's. Paul held back just a tad when he got to the solo, not wanting to come across as too extreme, but still explored the guitar enough to make it clear that he knew his way around it. When he was done, he struck a definitive final chord and sat back, waiting for a reaction.

John was smiling; Paul could tell instantly that he was impressed. "You like rock 'n' roll, then?" asked John.

"Oh yeah," said Paul, "it beats what they're putting out these days."

"You a purist or something?"

"No," said Paul quickly, "not at all. It's narrow, I think, to rule anything out based on when it was made or who made it…But music's got less fire now, I think. At least the last decade or so, it must've started a few years after the Turningpoint Election. Like people are still trying, but they're not really feeling it so much anymore. At least not in what you hear on the radio."

"When you hear anything at all on the radio," John supplied.

"That's a good point." The good stuff was out there, John was right, it just didn't ever get any airtime. Even the bad stuff barely got airtime. The restrictions were starting to become too much, just like they had for art and literature in the past few years, and many people simply didn't want to put in the effort anymore. Radio stations focused solely or primarily on music, particularly non-polemical music, were starting to become outdated, like bookstores or video galleries.

"D'you think–" Paul started hesitantly.

"What?"

"I mean, d'you think that should change anything? In terms of us, you know. Playing guitar, writing songs – I write songs," he added quickly, "I dunno if you do. But playing guitar, and looking for the fourth guy from the band, if you want to do that."

"You mean, the fact that music's going out? And the fact that if we aren't making propaganda songs, we won't get played anywhere?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think it should?" John asked. "Change anything?"

"No," said Paul staunchly.

John grinned. "Good. Me neither. They can shove the propaganda up their asses for all I care."

Paul returned the smile, not even sure why he had been concerned about that – after all, John didn't exactly seem like the type of person who regularly knelt to authority.

"All right," he said, "so I've played for you. Now let's see what you've got."

"Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah."

His eyes still locked with Paul's, John reached back behind him across his bed. When he straightened up again he was holding a worn composition notebook, which he tossed across the room. Paul caught it narrowly and opened it to the most recent page, which had been marked by the presence of a thick ballpoint pen.

"Song I'm working on," said John. "Care to help?"

His handwriting was messy, but Paul could make it out. Lyrics were scrawled across the page, crossed out and reordered here and there, squished beside or beneath their corresponding chords. To someone else it might have looked like a mess, but it was a form Paul knew by heart and could decipher easily; his own songwriting notebook in his school backpack actually looked very similar. The title was written at the top: "Hello Little Girl".

"I can try," he said. "Play me what you've got so far?"

"Sure."

He started in on the song. It was better than Paul had been expecting, and he had been expecting it to be good. John's singing voice, it turned out, was similar to his speaking voice – breathy and quick, with a very distinct Liverpool accent. It was a somewhat low and fairly energetic song, and it didn't take Paul long to get the hang of it; when John hit the second verse, he started to harmonize, and John watched him with something that looked like approval as the two of them sang.

Once they had finished, Paul told him to play it again, and this time stopped him a couple of times in the middle to offer suggestions about lyrics and chords. He was worried at first about taking it upon himself to critique John's work, and he could tell that John was wary of it too, but within a few minutes they were passing the notebook back and forth between them, and John was even asking him for more.

"Are you sure it's not imposing on what you've written too much?"

"No, you bloody idiot, here, shut up and tell me what you think about this last verse–"

It was then, with John passing the notebook back across the space between them to Paul, when a small card dropped out of it and to the floor.

In the interest of tidiness, Paul bent to pick it up, and he thought nothing of it until he was about to slip it back into the pages of the notebook. Then, seeing it more closely, he could tell that the edges were a pale, aged yellow, and that it had a deep crease as though it had been folded many times over in the past. Without asking John, without even thinking at all, he unfolded it and read:

RICHARD STARKEY

He knew that handwriting, the crunched-for-time scribble of the black ink pen. Looking back up at John, he asked, "Who's Richard Starkey?" He didn't mean for his voice to carry so much weight, but it did, they both heard it.

"I dunno," said John. He seemed largely unconcerned. "Is that yours?"

"No, it just…" He trailed off. Jean's words were back in his head, clear as day: _Ringo Starr, but it's like his stage name…Richard something._ "Fuck," he muttered to himself. "Pilgrim."

"Sorry?" John's eyebrows had furrowed together in the middle. "'Pilgrim'? What's that supposed to mean?"

Paul shook his head. He was already reaching down to pull the phone from his pocket. "I've got to call Jean."


	6. Chapter 6

"I'd like to end up sort of unforgettable."

-Ringo Starr

Jean was at a debate viewing party with Agnes when she got Paul's phone call. The university's politics clubs would often host viewing parties for national television that had to do with politics, and since it was election year there was one going on for practically every debate. The conservative clubs were the largest and densest on campus, and the particular viewing party Jean and Agnes had found was by contrast very small and poorly attended. A total of perhaps ten people were scattered among the desks, eating pizza and chatting a little off and on during the commercial breaks. One girl was typing furiously at a laptop on her desk, two monstrous textbooks balancing across her lap.

"See," Agnes said to Jean during one of the commercial breaks, "this is fun. Didn't I tell you this would be fun?"

"I never said it wouldn't be fun," Jean argued. Agnes was getting involved with the club and had wanted to go to show her support, and Jean had gone along partly for that reason and partly so that she would sound a little more knowledgeable about the election the next time she spoke to Mae on the phone. Though still behind, Kerry Walter was currently a lot closer in the polls to Jim Truebold than anyone had been expecting, and as a result Mae was always riled up about some detail or another and could go on ranting about it for hours.

They were sitting in a small lecture hall near Jean's dorm, watching the debate on a projector and eating pizza somebody from the club had ordered. Practically every time Truebold spoke, he would say something inflammatory or prejudiced, and in response someone in the room would call out something insulting or throw a slice of pepperoni at the screen in protest. Jean was actually quite enjoying it, especially since she wasn't going to have to be the one to pick up all the pepperonis.

"I did think the Islamophobia would be a little more veiled," Jean commented. Truebold had spent much of the program basking in praise from reporters and taking questions from moderators regarding his recent motion to completely ban Islam in America; it was progressing through various legal stages with surprisingly little resistance (a few years back there may have been more, but by now if there was any left it was invisible, buried under a collection of steadily mounting silence), and many of Truebold's supporters saw it as the latest in a long series of presidential triumphs.

"You expect too much of America," Agnes told her.

It was then that her phone started to ring. She picked it up quickly and moved outside and into the hallway just as the commercial break was ending.

"Hey, Paul."

"Jean," said Paul. "Hi. Listen, I'm at John's house and I think we just found another one of those index cards."

"What index cards?"

There was a pause for a moment on the other line. "Agnes didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

Another pause. "Is she there with you now?"

She crossed quickly back over to the door to the lecture hall, leaned in, and hissed: " _Agnes!_ "

Agnes turned around, blank-faced, and Jean beckoned her out into the hall.

"All right," Jean said, putting Paul on speakerphone, "What the hell's going on?"

"I'd like to know, too, for the record," said a slightly quieter voice on Paul's line. Jean recognized it instantly, and faster than she would have imagined possible a chill chased down her spine.

"John?" she asked.

"Hello," said John in a friendly tone.

"Hi, by the way," Agnes put in, "I'm here also. I'm Agnes."

"Agnes," said Paul, "tell John here and Jean about that girl you met."

"You met her, too," said Agnes. "I thought you'd tell them."

"You talk to Jean all the time, I just figured you–"

"Whatever," said Agnes. Clearly she didn't want to return to the subject of why she hadn't talked to Jean for the first few days after they'd found John. "I was waiting for John at the police station and it was around two, three in the morning. I was just about to fall asleep, and this girl showed up and sat down next to me. I didn't see where she came from, and she wasn't with anyone else. She looked pretty sleepy, like she'd just woken up, only it was the middle of the night. She just sat on the curb and didn't say anything, but I guess something about her being there just made me feel like I was awake again, and she had a few index cards with her – one for Paul, and one for herself."

"What do you mean," said Jean, "'for Paul'?" Her heart was hammering. How had they not told her this before?

"It had his name on it," said Agnes. "She handed it to him when he sat down, no explanation. 'Paul McCartney'."

"She gave me another one, too," Paul added, "after you left, Agnes. Said 'John Lennon' on it."

On the line with Paul, John didn't comment on this. He asked, "What was the girl's name?"

"She called herself 'Pilgrim'," said Agnes. "That's all."

"How was this not the first thing you told me?" Jean demanded. "Forget telling me about John – no offense, John–"

"Some taken," John said.

"–Why did no one tell me about a creepy girl named Pilgrim who knows who all of you guys are? I mean, did she _say_ anything?"

Agnes shrugged. "I was too sleepy to care, honestly. She didn't say anything the whole time I was with her."

"Same with me," said Paul.

"Not anything?"

"Not anything."

"Maybe she's mute," Agnes suggested.

"Or maybe she just didn't feel like talking to us," Paul said. "She certainly seemed ornery enough."

"'Ornery,'" John mimicked, his voice still coming through slightly more quietly on the other line. It was clear he was sitting somewhat away from the phone.

"All right, shut it," muttered Paul.

"Right," said John, a little more loudly this time, "are we all good and prepped now? Can we get to the actual reason we called, or are we going to sit around swapping legends about the mute girl all afternoon?"

"Right." Paul cleared his throat. "Well, John and I were going through this notebook of John's and we found another one. An index card. Pilgrim's handwriting."

"We don't know she was the one who wrote them," Agnes murmured, but her voice was absent, and if they cared at all about this point no one said anything.

"What did it say?" Jean asked.

"'Richard Starkey,'" said Paul.

"Oh my god." She said it quietly, as though she was still thinking, which she was. She knew the name, of course, as soon as she heard it. She could have kicked herself for not remembering it sooner. "Oh my god, that's Ringo."

"Our fourth man," Paul echoed. "I figured."

"Have you checked the phone book?"

"We've hardly had time," said John flippantly, "what with Paul tripping over himself to get to his phone and call you."

"Well, check it," she said abruptly. "Hopefully we'll have a little more luck this time. We can meet up, then, and look for him – if," she cut herself off, slowing down, "I mean, if you all want." She wasn't even sure why she said it, because even she sort of knew that this was going to be done whether they wanted to do it or not. And she knew that they would want to do it anyway.

"Relax, Jean," said Paul, much to her relief but not to her surprise. "We're already on our way."

They agreed to meet up at George's house, as Paul didn't care about missing his afternoon class and luckily neither Jean nor Agnes had any afternoon classes to skip to begin with. John drove himself and Paul over in Mimi's car without asking, and they beat Jean and Agnes there by about half an hour.

Paul's plan had been to dig into George's phone book as soon as they got there, but he was distracted the moment George's mother opened the door by the fact that he had forgotten to call ahead to say that he was coming.

"Oh," he said brightly. "Hi, Louise."

"Hello, Paul." She smiled.

"This's my friend John. Is George home?"

"In his room." She had already stepped aside to let him in. George's mother and father were the type of people who were automatically welcoming; they didn't need forewarning or excuses, they needed only to know your face to be glad to see you.

"Thanks," said Paul, slipping past her. "My father gives his regards." He didn't actually – in fact Paul's father rather disapproved of George, who in Mr. McCartney's opinion was a little too witty and wore leather jackets too often – but he figured it was a polite thing to say.

Upstairs, George was sitting on his bed with his legs crossed, his guitar in his lap and an open notebook in front of him. He was fiddling around with the strings, but he stopped and looked up when Paul and John walked in.

"So you're John," he said.

"You're George?" John asked. "You're just a kid. He's a kid," he repeated, turning to Paul. "I thought you were young and this kid's even younger."

"I'm not that much younger than you," said George.

"Like hell you aren't."

"Well, in the grand scheme of things."

"In the grand–" John stopped midsentence, noticing the posters on the walls. They appeared to catch him off guard a little but he tried to look casual, apprehensive even, as he took a moment to survey them. "You like Dylan?"

" _Freewheelin'_ s my favorite," replied George.

John looked at him and nodded just a little, as though the idea of George in itself was beginning to grow on him. He sat down in the chair and faced George's bed, leaning back as comfortably as if the room and the chair were his own. "Mine too," he said. "All right, let's see what you've got."

"What I've got?"

"Yeah, what do you know?" He considered for a moment and then said, "How about 'Raunchy,' can you play 'Raunchy'?"

"'Course I can," said George.

John waited. When George only stared at him, he asked, "Well, are you going to?"

"What is this, an audition? How about you play something for me?"

John arched an eyebrow. "I haven't got to prove myself to a fifteen-year-old."

"If you've got nothing to prove, then do it," said George easily.

John gave a small half-smile that already Paul recognized – it was a smile for sure, but also hard at the edges, a challenge. It was gone as quickly as it had come. "All right," he said, "give it here."

George handed the guitar across the bed, comfortably but still with a great deal of care. It wasn't a particularly expensive guitar, in fact Paul was fairly certain he'd gotten it secondhand, but he kept it well, and in all the time he'd owned it he hadn't gotten so much as a scratch on the wood. Paul watched John's face as he took the cheap guitar for any sign of judgment or contempt, but there was none, and he handled it as respectfully as if it were his own.

There was no warning before John started to play. As soon as the guitar was somewhat settled in his lap, he struck a single, loud, confident chord, a brazen G, and started to sing.

" _Oh, dirty Maggie Mae_ –"

Paul grinned as soon as he started, and George smiled, too. It was an old Liverpool song, they all knew it. John heavily exaggerated his accent as he sang, and from the first line he sounded more like a parody of a nineteenth-century British sailor than what he really was, a twenty-first-century immigrant to America. They let him get through the first couple of verses alone, and when he hit the chorus they both joined in, accent and all.

" _For she robbed so many a sailor – and skinned so many a whaler – and she'll never shine in Paradise Street no more!_ "

It was a long song, but John stopped it there, grinning as he handed the guitar back over to George.

"Your turn," he said.

George took the guitar, but before he could start playing, they heard footsteps coming quickly up the stairs. The door swung open and Jean leaned in, one hand on the doorknob.

"Guys, hi!" She was a little out of breath.

"Hello," said John, "are you Jean?"

"Yeah. I know who you are," she said unnecessarily. Addressing them all, she went on, "Listen, I looked up 'Richard Starkey' on my phone on the way over here. He's on drums tonight at the Cavern City Music Club. His band's only on until ten, though, so we've got to go now if we want to see him!"

"Imagine that," John remarked passively, looking over at Paul. "She found Richard Starkey on her phone on the way over here."

"Yeah, I don't see any phone books out in here – way to be productive, guys," said Jean, already turning to hurry back down the stairs.

They all exchanged glances and then got up almost as a unit, starting to follow her. George put the guitar automatically down on his bed, but John picked it up again and caught him by the arm before he had left the room. "Hey," he said, "you're not getting off that easy."

George glanced at the guitar and then back up at John. "What, right now?"

"You can play it on the way over. Come on." He clapped him amiably on the shoulder, handed him back the guitar, and hurried down the stairs after Paul.

Out on the sidewalk in front of George's place, Jean was standing with Agnes and scanning the street. "Shit," she said as Paul and the others caught up behind her.

"I tried to get him to stay," said Agnes, shaking her head. "The guy was a bit of an asshole. Said five's too many people anyway."

"What is it?" asked Paul.

Jean turned around to face him. "The cabdriver left."

They didn't seem to react at all. "That's no problem," said George, "we can take the bus."

"There's a bus stop near here?" asked John.

George was already walking back down his own driveway. "You didn't see it coming in?" he called over his shoulder.

The bus was partially hidden now behind trees at the back of the drive, but it still would have been impossible not to notice, the yellow distinct even in shade. A smile spread across John's face as he put the pieces together.

"Fantastic," he said.

"George drives it to school sometimes," Agnes explained to him as they walked over.

He looked sidelong at her with his most winning, inquisitive smile. "Hello, by the way," he said. "I'm John."

"I'm Agnes." She stuck out her hand, and he shook it as they walked without breaking pace.

"Agnes, you're very pretty, you know that?"

"Thanks," she said. "I'm also a lesbian with high standards." She skipped past him then and hopped lithely onto the bus.

Paul shook his head mockingly at John. "Harsh," he said. John stuck out his tongue at him.

Paul ended up driving so that George would be free to play the guitar. Jean and Agnes stayed up front to keep Paul company, and George followed John, who led him all the way to the back of the bus. There were many rows between them and the front, but since the bus was empty apart from the five of them, the distance felt a lot less divisive. Paul pulled off onto the main road with the radio on mute (the only station coming through clearly was a daily government broadcast anyway), and he and Agnes and Jean listened in as soon as they heard George start to play.

"Raunchy" was a twangy Bill Justis song from the fifties and for a song that sounded tricky in theory, it was even trickier in practice. George played it comfortably. Not as if he had been programmed to do it, not as if he had been practicing this exact song every day for a year, just as if it was one of the functions of his hands, handling this guitar, as if he had earned every drop of the ease with which he played it. He wore a look of focus as he played, looking mostly at the instrument itself, relaxed but concentrated. Every single note was perfect.

When he finished, John looked him over with approval and then looked over toward Paul at the front of the bus. "Where'd you find this fellow, anyway?" he called, smiling.

"He just sort of popped up one day, I can't seem to shake him!"

"I'm in, then?" George asked John.

He had already been in, and they all knew it. "'Course you are," said John. "Anyway, you and Paul already know each other, right? I'm the one who should be asking if I'm in or not."

"You're all in," said Jean decisively, bending over her cell phone without looking at any of them. She was texting Mae, who was still watching the debate and kept sending her updates. "No use beating around it."

"It's lucky I found you all," said John, looking around at them all, even though George was really the only one sitting near him. "My other band left me a bit high and dry."

"Other band?" asked Paul from the driver's seat.

"Yeah, the Quarrymen. We got run out of a few clubs – for our image or for not being religious enough or some other bullshit. They all started quitting. The last two left about a month ago, I've been solo since then."

"Run out of clubs?" repeated George.

"Yeah, you know, a few. Most places won't book you anymore unless you're singing about God or American values, and – well," he said, smiling, "I'm not American, for one thing."

"He meant was it anything dangerous?" asked Agnes.

John shrugged. "No more than average, I suppose."

"What he means is he lives a wild, roguish life of intrigue and outlawry," Paul explained.

"When I'm not eating home-cooked meals with my aunt, that is," John clarified.

"Well, that goes without saying."

Jean heard everything they were saying peripherally, but her attention was absorbed in her phone. She didn't normally do this when she was hanging out with other people, but she was still listening to what they were all saying, and besides, Mae was unstoppable.

 _He's not as prepared as kerry_ , she texted Jean, talking, of course, about Truebold. She was sending her practically a live commentary.

Jean knew this already, having watched a good portion of the debate with Agnes. She would have known it even if she hadn't been watching. Truebold never prepared for anything – to his supporters, it was one of his charms, the fact that he was unrehearsed and therefore down to earth and straightforward. To political traditionalists like Mae, it was less charming and more simply baffling. _Does it matter?_ she sent back. _He never prepares and he always seems to come off well anyway_.

 _Kerry's getting some support but not enough, truebold's applause is way louder, and they keep heckling her._

 _Who does?_

 _Dumbasses in the back row. They were going to clear them out but truebold said to keep them, said they're exercising free speech._

Free speech. Jean never would have thought that anything that sounded so simple could be made so problematic. From the way it sounded up-front, the things Truebold went on about – free speech, American tradition, patriotism, community and family values – all sounded like good things, uncomplicated things. It was only once you paid more attention to the type of person he was that religious values started looking more like professional exclusion, and American tradition more like isolationist racism. But nobody did look that closely anymore. All the people who had used to look closely and criticize him, during his first election or even his second, had long since been worn down, discouraged by others or demoralized by their own efforts or both.

 _It's almost like it's no use_ , Mae sent back. She sounded desperate, even in text. _In order to make sense to his supporters kerry has to respond to his arguments, but his arguments are so stupid, how can she respond to him without being on his level?_

Jean could think of nothing to say. It was an old conversation; she was surprised Mae even had the fervor to keep going with it, as though there were hope. _I'm sorry_ , she texted her.

"We're here!" Paul called out, bringing her back to her present setting as he pulled up to an intersection in downtown Cavern. It was dark by now and the whole street was lit up with shops, a few restaurants, a 7-Eleven, a historic movie theatre with CAVERN flashing in bright red bulbs down the side, and the Cavern City Music Club, a smaller establishment next to the theatre with a modest entrance and the acts of the night spelled out in black block letters above it. Tonight it read, MAC THORN…CATFISH…TOMMY AND THE TORNADOES.

Agnes looked over at Jean and raised his eyebrows. "'Tommy and the Tornadoes'?"

"I'm telling you, it's him," Jean said.

"Who? Tornado Tommy himself?"

"His drummer," Jean told her, barely suppressing a smile. "Try not to swoon."

"Oy," Paul called back, "get off the bus! I can't stick around here forever, I've got to park."

Jean, Agnes, John, and George hurried single-file down the steps of the bus, just in time for the light to turn green. The bus rolled away and they were left on the sidewalk, facing the giant block letters and a teenager with braids sitting behind a small ticket window. The music club and the theatre shared a ticket window since they were right next to each other, and the girl inside, dressed in the ironed black slacks and a crisp button-up black shirt, clearly worked for the theatre.

"We're all for the music club," said Jean in a rush, as soon as they were close enough to the glass for her to hear them. "Tommy and the Tornadoes."

"Five dollars each, please," said the girl. Admission to places like the Cavern City Music Club was getting cheaper with every passing year, as public interest in music declined and would-be customers stopped coming out for steeper prices. They managed to fork over twenty dollars between the four of them, the girl handed them their wristbands, and they crowded inside near the end of a song.

The lights were very dim and dusky, and most of the people inside were sitting at round coffee-variety tables that had been scattered throughout the room. There were a few other kids who looked school-aged, but also a lot of older adults, people in their thirties and forties and older, people who had been alive long enough to remember when more people had cared about this sort of thing. Here out of nostalgia or hope or maybe worse, maybe both.

The tables were actually mostly full, but George managed to spot a free one near the back and they hastily claimed it. "Didn't know they'd draw such a crowd," Agnes remarked as she sat down, taking off her small black purse to rest it in her lap.

"The Tornadoes are pretty popular, they play here a lot," George said over the music. "Mac Thorn's the real custom crowd-pleaser, though, all he sings about is God."

Jean looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. "You come here often?" she asked dryly.

"Paul and I come a lot when the good bands are playing," he said. "It's not too often, but it's often enough. There are a lot of Thorn's types."

"Sounds boring, if all he sings about it God," said John absently. He was leaning a little to one side, craning his head to get a look at the band. They had stopped at the end of the song and were moving around now, adjusting equipment and making jokes with the crowd. Ringo was nowhere to be seen.

"I don't think so," said Agnes.

Jean looked over at her in surprise. "You're religious?" She didn't know why she was surprised – it seemed like practically everyone was religious these days.

"I'm atheist," said Agnes, "but I don't think God is boring."

"Well, sure," said John with an air of dismissal, "but we hear about God all the time. I don't know about you, but I'd rather hear about something more fun every once in a while."

Agnes didn't look over at him when she answered; she was still watching the stage. "I don't know what I'd rather hear," she said. "I don't think I could say until I'd heard it."

Jean waited for John to reply, but he didn't entirely look like he wanted to. Luckily for them all, a smattering of applause and started up around them, punctuated by a few whoops of appreciation, and they looked up to see two young men jogging out onto the stage. One of them stopped in front of the main microphone and adjusted it just a little to fit his height, casting a charming grin upon them all and saying, "Sorry for the delay, folks. We've got one more song if that's all right."

As the crowd cheered their approval, the second young man took a seat behind the drum set. He wasn't unattractive but he was peculiar-looking in a way that was hard to put into words – something about his long, pointed nose, or the way his long eyebrows rose together plaintively in the middle. It was easy to picture him sullen, hard to picture him angry. He exchanged a glance with the man in front – Tommy – and then began abruptly to play the drums, rocketing the band forward into the song, and upon the instant he looked happy. His smile was different from John's smile or Paul's or even George's – while their grins were sometimes a little deeper, more halting, or even devious, Ringo smiled like a child, with open delight. Jean's heart leapt to see him.

The crowd was nodding along to the music, a mediocre pop song that many of them seemed to be familiar with, but everyone at Jean's table was watching only the drummer, catching whatever glimpses of him they could through the crowd and the other members of the band. He was still grinning broadly, the whole way through the song, looking more engaged at times even than Tommy. He was doing more than keeping pace. He was more than the backbone of the music, more than the heartbeat – there were times that Jean thought he was the heart itself. He gave the music rhythm and spirit, gave it kick.

When they got to the chorus, John started laughing, the way people laugh at things they can't believe. Jean looked over at him and he was grinning with a delight that mirrored Ringo's, as if it were infectious, still watching the stage. "He's good!" he exclaimed, unnecessarily. "Jean, you were right. He's good!"

Paul showed up about halfway through the song. There wasn't a seat free at the table so he just stood there behind John's chair, panting a little from his rush to get in, watching the stage with his mouth open. At one point he laughed a little, too, and Jean saw him exchange glances with John and then George. The expression on all of their faces was plain to read: Ringo was it.

As soon as the song was over, their table erupted with applause; John and George even stood up next to Paul as they clapped. The other tables clapped politely and returned to their conversations as Tommy bid them all goodnight and the band started heading backstage. As soon as they started disappearing down the steps of the stage, Paul was off, shouldering his way hastily but politely through groups of people and around tables, making a beeline for the door to the backstage area. John and George looked at one another and shrugged before following after him, and Jean and Agnes lingered behind. Their eyes met.

"Should I follow them?" Jean asked. Something about the whole situation seemed to be stopping her.

"No," said Agnes. "Come on, let's get a soda. We can wait for them outside."


	7. Chapter 7

A guy in a Cavern City Music Club tee shirt stopped Paul short at the door to backstage. "Musicians only," he said.

Paul tried to look past him, but the guy stepped over, blocking him. "If I could just–"

"Musicians only."

Maybe he thought Paul was trying to stir up trouble, like the people John had mentioned running into at some of his other gigs. "I'm not going to cause any trouble," said Paul earnestly. "I liked them, really."

The guy squinted at him, looked him over. "I'm sure you liked them fine," he said.

Paul waited. "So?" he prompted him. "I don't even need to see all of them, if I could just talk for a moment to Ringo–"

"Who?"

Paul hesitated, struggling to summon up Ringo's real name in his mind. "Richard Starkey. The drummer."

"Ritchie? Why?"

"I liked the performance," said Paul, impatient.

The guy looked like he was about fed up with Paul, but luckily John stepped up next to him then, followed quickly by George. A look of recognition passed over the music club guy's face.

"John!" he said, clapping John on the back. "You're not on tonight, are you?" Making the connection after a moment, he looked over at Paul and George and then back again at John. "D'you know this kid? Says he wants to talk to Tommy's drummer."

"Yeah, sorry, he's with me. He's a little lacking in the social graces," John said, smiling.

"Hey," Paul cut in, "shut it."

"You see what I mean?" John said to the music club guy, shaking his head in mock disapproval. "It's all right, Harry, we'll only take a moment."

All of the guy's earlier hesitation was gone. He opened the door, let the three of them file one after another inside, and shut it swiftly behind them.

The lighting was just as dim backstage, but there was only one hallway to follow, and it would have been apparent which way to go even if John hadn't been leading the way. Within moments they were in a cluttered space full of amps, instruments, and other equipment, where a handful of musicians – Tommy's band but also a few others, most of the people who had played that night – were milling around, talking and gathering up their things.

They found Ringo by himself in a corner near the door, rummaging around in a backpack. Bent over the bag, he didn't see them at first, and even when John cleared his throat he didn't look up. George bent down toward him and said in an affable voice, "Hello there."

Ringo looked up, startled. "Hello," he said.

"What's your name?" asked George.

"I'm Ritchie," he said. "What–" He stopped, frowned, clearly recognizing something in George. His voice. "Hang on," he said, "are you from England?"

"We all are," said John, chiming in. "We came here to America just for you."

"Ha, ha," said Ringo. "Where in England?"

"Liverpool," chorused John and Paul, almost simultaneously.

Ringo frowned. He looked between the three of them again. "Do you know Tommy?" he asked. "Or Vic? Is this a joke?"

"'S not a joke," said George in a calm but dignified sort of way. He held out his hand, and Ringo shook it, if a little dubiously. "I'm George Harrison."

Ringo looked from George over to Paul and John.

"Oh, I'm Paul McCartney," said Paul with a little wave. "I'm George's friend."

"And I'm John Lennon. I'm Paul's friend," added John.

"John and I aren't friends yet," said George helpfully.

"No, not quite yet," John agreed.

"Oh." Ringo nodded and smiled as though this was great new information for him, not ironically at all, and finally pulled out what he had been looking for in his backpack. It was something enormous and lumpy wrapped in wax paper, and he started peeling back the paper to reveal a sandwich so stuffed with chicken and vegetables that it was practically falling apart. "Do you all play here?" he asked them. "I don't think I've seen you before."

"John has, but we all haven't," said George.

"But we will," added Paul.

"You think we will?" George asked Paul sidelong.

"Oh yes. We quite enjoyed you all," Paul added, speaking to Ringo now, "you and the Tornadoes, I mean."

"Did you!" The smile widened around the sandwich. "I'm glad," said Ringo with his mouth full.

"Your drumming," said John, nodding. "It was really all right."

"Thanks," said Ringo. He looked pleased. "Are you all a band, then?"

John and Paul and George glanced around at one another. None of them said anything; the answer was probably closer to yes than it was to no, but saying it out loud would make it official. And it would speak for all three of them, when they hadn't entirely talked about it amongst themselves before. They had barely even had a complete conversation amongst themselves before – John and George had only just met. They had been so swept up in the search for Ringo that they hadn't even all played together as a group yet. It felt unnatural, even now, to call themselves a band simply because they all knew each other now.

Despite this, Ringo seemed to take their silence as a yes. "What d'you call yourselves?" he asked.

"One step at a time, Ringo," said John soothingly. "So many questions, you'll give yourself a sickness."

"The point is," said Paul, "we wanted to know if you'd join us."

Ringo stared around at them all, chewing an enormous bite from his sandwich. He was smiling a little in disbelief. When he finally swallowed he said, as though they had just reached the end of a good mutual joke, "No thanks."

It took a moment for the words to reach Paul. He wasn't sure why he hadn't been expecting them, but after so many successes, and with so much ease, it was a bit of a startling halt. Of course, he realized now, it made sense. Ringo wasn't just going to say yes, right off the bat. It would have been too good to be true.

John shrugged. "I can't say I blame him," he said to the others. "I wouldn't've joined us either, if I were still in a band."

"Thanks for the offer," said Ringo to them all, in a voice that was fair and a little apologetic, "but I've got a good thing going here, and I don't really know who you all are. Not that I'm not sure you're all fine people, of course." He shoveled the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth as he spoke, then crumpled up the wrapper and dropped it in the trash.

John was unfolding a piece of paper in his hands. It was creased and dark purple, and Paul recognized it as the music club's weekly schedule; he must have gotten his hands on a copy from one of the tables. He scanned it over and then looked up at Ringo expectantly. "Next Friday, then," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Next Friday. You and the Tornadoes. We'll come back and convince you then."

Ringo gave a polite, wary smile. "No offense, mate, but the Tornadoes are good. I don't think you'll convince me."

"We'll try, then," said Paul.

"I suppose," said Ringo. He zipped his bag up again and slung it over one shoulder. "I can't stop you from trying."

Tommy came up to them then, with a couple of the other guys from the band. "Hello," he said friendlily to Paul and John and George, and then, turning to Ringo, "You ready to go?"

Ringo nodded. "Sorry to have to run," he said to the others. He adjusted the strap of his bag over his shoulder, picked up his drumsticks from the chair his things had been sitting, and then he was gone, following Tommy and the rest of the band out the door. He glanced back at them only once as he rounded the corner into the backstage hallway, and then he was gone.

Most of the other band by now had cleared out already or were finishing packing up their things. Paul had expected to feel empty, but instead he felt strangely hopeful. So Ringo wasn't with them yet. There was no doubt in Paul's mind that he would be someday, and likely someday soon.

"He's right, you know," he said to John and George. "We can't exactly call ourselves a band if we've never even practiced together, or written any songs."

"I've written songs," said John, sinking down to sit on the chair that Ringo had just left.

"You know what I mean. Band songs, songs we've done together."

"Paul," said George suddenly. "You and I've written a song. You remember?"

He did remember. They had tried writing a few together, as a matter of fact, but he knew the one George was talking about because they had collaborated on it more than they had on anything else. They had written it a little less than a year ago, after school one day in Paul's living room. It was good – at least, Paul had thought it was good – but they hadn't ever done anything with it, and in terms of its development, it still had a ways to go.

"It's just one song," said Paul haltingly.

"Any song is just one song," said George.

"It needs a lot of work."

John shrugged. "So let's work on it now." He jumped to his feet, as though newly energized by the idea. "If it's shit, I've got a whole notebook full of others we could try," he pointed out.

Paul grinned. There was no point in resisting – John had shown him one of his own songs practically as soon as they had met. There was no reason Paul shouldn't show him one in return. "All right," he said, "but we need guitars."

"I've got mine on the bus," said George.

"There's probably another around here we can use," said John. "George, you go and get yours and we'll look for a second."

Paul tossed George the keys and told him where he'd parked the bus, and then he followed John out of the backstage area and down the hallway a few yards, into another small back room full of equipment. As far as Paul could tell, it was all electrical stuff, cords and keyboards and amps, but he indulged John and helped him look. The room was cluttered and he had to lift things up or move them around to get a proper look, taking his steps carefully to avoid stepping on anything.

"Are you sure we can practice here at all?" he asked John. "We won't get kicked out?"

John shook his head. "They're closing soon, but people are in and out of here all the time. Musicians, management, maintenance workers. We won't be the only ones around, but we won't be taking up any of the real musicians' space, either."

Paul bent down to peer behind one of the amps. "How often do you play here, then? Ringo – or Ritchie, or whoever he is – didn't know you."

"I haven't been by in a few weeks," said John. "I played here with the Quarrymen a lot, and then by myself a few times after we split up, but–"

"Little hard to carry a solo rock'n'roll act?" Paul guessed.

John looked over at him and raised his eyebrows. "For you, maybe."

"Oh, go on."

"I thought I'd try branching out a bit, finding other clubs. After I got locked up in Ajax" – he shrugged, facing away – "Mimi sold my guitar."

Paul stopped and stared at him, motionless for a moment. "Really?"

He nodded, seemingly unaffected. "Got it back, though. My mum gave me the money. Oh, yes!" he exclaimed suddenly, reaching back behind the clutter and lifting up a hard black guitar case. He laid it on one of the tables, undid the latches, and held up the lid briefly to make sure there was one inside. "We're in business."

Paul straightened up in relief. "Any more back there?"

"You're out of luck. Looks like it's me and George playing alone today."

"Ha, ha."

He turned to leave the room and keep looking elsewhere, but just as he was about to leave, he felt something hard prod into his back.

He looked back. John was grinning, holding a second case now in his other hands. "I'm only joking, you know," he said.

Paul smiled back and took the guitar.

"By the way," he said as he followed John out of the room and back into the hallway, "you never did say why you were arrested." He said it gingerly, hoping it wasn't too personal a question.

"You never did ask."

"Well, I'm asking now." They had made it back into the other room, and he took a seat, brought out the guitar, and began tuning it. John sat down across from him and did the same.

"I went to play at a club there." John sounded bitter even talking about it, but also casual, as though he was trying to seem too cool even to care. "Made a comment onstage. Fellow in the crowd took issue with it, brought it up with me later outside." His gaze was fixed to the guitar in his lap and he was turning the small metal knobs slowly, gently. "Anyway," he said. "Disorderly conduct, they called it. Just a lot of rubbish."

"The fellow you were fighting," said Paul. "They arrest him, too?" He couldn't remember seeing anyone else brought in with John, back when they had seen him in the station.

"Not a chance. When the cops came he told them what I'd said, and they were more on his side than mine." He hesitated and then muttered, still looking at the guitar, "To be fair, he probably pulled himself together a little more than I did."

"Well, what was it you said?" Paul asked. "To make him so angry in the first place?"

"I thought I'd make a joke," he said. "You know, to lighten up the mood. I'd told a few others and they all seemed warm to it. The first thing I thought of right then was, Truebold had given a speech earlier in the day, so I said I thought he'd been very down-to-earth, very eloquent."

Paul frowned. That couldn't be all. "Really? People took issue with that?"

"I know, I didn't see it coming, either. I said he was very eloquent indeed, especially for someone who looks like Patrick Bateman dipped in grease."

Paul felt his mouth drop open. He had heard a few negative opinions toward Jim Truebold in his life, scattered across the years, but always they were veiled, hesitant. Never this. "You _said_ that?"

"First thing that came to mind." He grinned. "Guess I could've read the room a little better."

Paul paused a moment, letting silence settle between them. Then he sat forward. "Listen," he said, "are we going to be doing – stuff like that?"

"Stuff like what?"

"You know." He hesitated. "Political stuff. Controversial."

"Jesus, Paul. We haven't written a single song yet and you're already–"

"I know," said Paul. "I know. It's just–" He had stopped tuning by now and his attention was gone from the guitar altogether, now focused entirely on John. "It's better to know now."

John looked back at him. For a moment, something about his expression made Paul expect the worse answer, the insane answer. But when John spoke he said plainly, "It's just for fun, Paul. I just want to make music."

Paul felt himself smile. He was surprised how much the answer relieved him, but then again, it made sense. These days it seemed like everything was political. Everything was charged with societal context, with religion, with hate and feeling and fear. Music was the one angle of his life that didn't involve that. It was fun, plain and simple, and he didn't want that to change.

"Good," he said. "Good, me too."

It was then that George came back into the room, lugging his own guitar at his side. "Paul," he called, tossing him the keys before starting to drag over his own chair. "You didn't tell me you parked up the biggest hill in town."

Paul pocketed the keys. "You get a good workout, then?"

"You could say that." He looked from Paul to John and back to Paul again. Then he sat down in his chair, bent down, and took the guitar carefully from its case. When he straightened back up again he said, "Well, we may as well start."

It took them a few minutes to really get into the song. George remembered the guitar part the most clearly (not to mention he could simply play it the best), so he led, and Paul and John gradually felt out the chords they would need to support the rhythm. They were having trouble with the lyrics, so Paul found a napkin and a pen and scribbled down everything he could remember, showing it to George briefly and then putting it down in front of John so that he would know how it went. Paul and George sang the song together the first few times, and then, once John had gotten a hold of it, John took over lead vocals while the two of them harmonized. It was a slower song, simple and tender, and their voices fit together well over the guitar. They worked through it methodically, as a group, stopping frequently to sort out chords and harmonies.

"'I'll look after you' – when do you come in, then?"

"We start with you, here, with the 'ooh-wah' – see?"

They were still getting acquainted with each other's musical habits, or else they probably could have done it even more quickly, but barely half an hour had gone by before they felt like they had it.

"Should we run through it – the whole song, then, now?" asked Paul, and they were in agreement.

He knew it was good by the time they had reached the first chorus. Not good for a bunch of amateurs, not even good for their first song done as a group – just good, period. This pieced-together song he had written with George, casually several months ago with a single guitar, was now a fully animate thing, with three different parts and fleshed-out harmonies. George's playing style was twangy and unique, it had character, and John sang well, not hesitating or shying away from the high parts. It was odd, John being so new, but they were somehow cohesive. When they all came together, they gave the song a presence of its own.

" _In spite of all the danger / In spite of all that may be / I'll do anything for you, anything you want me to / If you'll be true to me!_ "

The last high note sat in the air between them for a minute as they let the last guitar chords fade from the air. None of them had been expecting it to sound that good, and now, looking at each other, they were unsure of how to react – nobody wanted to seem overly triumphant, but Paul could tell, just looking at each of their faces, that all three of them felt it. This thrumming within him, John and George felt it too.

"Weeknights."

They all jumped at the voice – it had come from the direction of the door. It was a deep voice, one Paul almost recognized–

He turned and looked, and standing there was Ringo, holding a pair of drumsticks in one hand.

His other hand was in his jeans pocket and he was standing in the middle of the doorway. He wasn't smiling this time, but looking at them much more seriously – as though some part of him was still watching them, still assessing what he had seen.

"Hello, it's you again," said John cheerfully.

He held up the drumsticks. "Left these behind, earlier."

"What d'you mean," asked George, "'weeknights'?"

"I mean I'm sure as hell not quitting the Tornadoes to play with some band that's not even established," he said. "Especially not when bands are as rare as they are these days. The business is too rickety, that's all there is to it."

"'Rickety,'" John repeated under his breath, grinning over at Paul. "He used the word 'rickety'."

"But I'll play with you on weeknights," Ringo told them. "If you three can manage it."

Paul was on campus most weeknights, but he didn't hesitate. Already he probably cared about this more than he cared about school, anyway. "I can manage it," he said quickly, knowing the others would agree. George was off the bus by four at the latest on the days he even bothered, and Paul wasn't sure whether John went to school in the first place.

"Right," Ringo said, once they had all agreed. That huge grin split across his face again – it had been strange, seeing him without it for that entire stretch of time – and he nodded to them. "The band's waiting, I've got to run."

They waved him goodbye, and a moment later he was out the door.

The three of them sat in silence for a moment longer; Paul was aware that he was grinning widely, but he didn't care. The success of the song had been followed so closely by the success of Ringo that none of them was entirely sure what to say.

"Well," said George, "it looks like we've got ourselves a drummer."

Jean and Agnes had left for ice cream once it had become clear that the boys would all be backstage for a while, and apart from a brief surprise encounter with George, who was jogging down the street with a guitar and barely paused to give them an explanation, they had no contact from any of them until around midnight. They were circling back around to the music club, each finishing her second cone of ice cream.

"My goal is to try all of the flavors before I graduate," said Agnes, wiping a little melted chocolate cream from her chin.

"But they switch some of them out every month," said Jean. "Sometimes they never have them again."

"Then I'll just have to go every month, won't I?"

They stopped on the sidewalk at the sight of Paul, John, and George, all walking together out of the music club. Ringo wasn't with them, but they looked happy – they walked with a distinct ease, always trading glances, talking with one another and laughing.

"Aw, look," Agnes said, elbowing Jean lightly. "You musical matchmaker, you."

Jean ignored her and waved to get the boys' attention.

"Jean, Agnes," George greeted them as the two girls joined their group and they all more or less fell into step together. He and Paul seemed to be leading the way down the sidewalk, direction-wise. "I hope you're ready, we've got a lot of walking ahead of us."

"We've got a lot of walking _behind_ us," said Agnes. "What were you all doing in there, painting a mural? We thought you were just going to chat with Ringo."

"Not that we mind," Jean added quickly. "We got some pretty good ice cream in the meantime."

"We did chat with him," said George, in response to Agnes. "He seems decent. Says he'll drum for us."

"On _weeknights_ ," John put in, mimicking the sense of drama with which Ringo had spoken. George and Paul both laughed.

The walk back to the bus was indeed long – Paul had had to park it on a side street, a little out of the way of downtown – but none of them seemed to mind. They were wrapped up in conversation – sometimes it splintered off into groups of two or three of them, and sometimes all five of them were at it, firing opinions and jokes back and forth as they walked. The subject matter drifted quickly, and it wasn't until they had gotten back to the bus that the topic of the band came up again.

Nobody got in the driver's seat when they got on – no one had any ideas for where to go, anyway, and here was as good a place as any to talk. They sat facing one another, in a sort of circle on the ends of the seats.

"I think," said John finally, after a lot of the old laughter and conversation had died down, "maybe we ought to come up with a name." Off their expressions, he added, "We could use 'the Quarrymen' again, or we could change it, I don't know what you're all thinking."

Jean stared at John across the narrow aisle of the darkened bus and felt something course through her. A thrill of something – excitement, maybe. They were serious about this, then, at least John was. A name. A name would make it official.

A name would make everything real.

"Jean," Paul said, turning to face her, "what was it you said we were called? The first time we existed, or whatever?"

She hesitated this time, just slightly. It suddenly felt as though every other time she'd said it, she had only been blurting it out, but this time, here on this bus, she would be speaking it before all of them for real. "The Beatles," she said.

John stifled a laugh. "The Beatles," he repeated. "What, why stop there? We could call ourselves the Crickets, or the Cockroaches, or–"

"Actually," said George suddenly, "I was thinking about that."

John looked over at him. "Cockroaches?"

"No, the name. The Beatles. It's a little plain all by itself, but I was thinking – what if we changed the spelling?"

Jean and the others stared at him, not quite following. In the darkness that had fallen upon the inside of the bus they could make out the lines of his face, the shadow of his hair, but not much else.

"How d'you mean?" asked Paul.

"Well, if instead of B-E-E-T-L-E-S we spelled it B-E-A-T-L-E-S – it's a pun, y'see? Like the beat in music."

Suddenly Jean realized – this was new to George, new to all of them. She had never spelled the word out for them, only said it aloud. Naturally they must have all assumed it would just be spelled like the bug. To them, this was a fresh idea. She bit her tongue and tried not to smile.

"Actually–" Paul hesitated, then started again. "Actually," he said slowly, "I think I like that." He looked sidelong at John, waiting for a reaction.

"Yeah." John waited a split second and then grinned, seeming to give in. "Yeah, I guess that wouldn't bug me too much."

"All right," said Paul, nudging him half-chidingly for the pun. She couldn't make out his face in the darkness, but she knew from his voice and from his profile that it was Paul. "It looks like we've got ourselves a band."

Jean exchanged glances with Agnes. She knew Agnes still didn't understand exactly how Jean felt about all of this, but she could make out her face enough in that look to know that they were on the same page here. There were many things yet to sort out – Ringo, for one, didn't even know about the name, not to mention he was still playing with the Tornadoes. And they would have to try practicing some more, and writing some more songs together, and somehow they would have to get in with the people at the music club so that they would be able to play in public. No doubt these all seemed like great looming obstacles to Paul and John and George, but Jean barely even felt the need to think about them. It would all be sorted out. They were on the right track now, they were the Beatles. There was no going back.

They kept talking and messing around on the bus far into the night before there was any thought of leaving. It felt like they were in a cave – indeed, in a cavern – hidden there in the middle of the bus, swabbed with shadows, the night deep and pitch-black all around them. That bus could have been anywhere. They were aware only of the sights and sounds of each other's faces and voices, and of the sounds of the crickets outside, singing some long late-summer uproar in the grass.


	8. Chapter 8

p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"The graffiti artist arrived at midnight. This was how it went on the nights he came out, which were once or twice a month and becoming more often. He arrived in town at midnight and surveyed his destination, usually somewhere downtown or on campus, getting a feel for it, circling, seeing who was around. He would leave for a while, gather his supplies from wherever he had stashed them. Somewhere between midnight and dawn he would do his work./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He made small things, sometimes recognizable images. A child in a red raincoat in the bottom corner of the wall outside Pence Library. A deer frozen in time behind the theatre. For the most part, though, his style was abstract, swooping and angular, bordering on cubist, full of strange splotches and different colors that when thrown together made sense only to him. It was an unconventional style for graffiti, but then again, graffiti was an unconventional pastime. Cavern was more lax about leaving vandalism around than many other cities, but even so, more often than not his work was covered up within the week./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"On the night of the second presidential debate, he found himself out back behind the Cavern City Music Club and decided to paint a mural. He had never done a mural before in his life and hadn't been planning on doing one tonight; a mural was big, obviously, it took time and thought, and the time consideration in particular made it more likely that he would be caught by the police while he was making it. But there was an image that had been stuck in his head all day and even longer, something he had seen, and knew he might not see and understand again unless he set it out clearly before himself and before the city in paint./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He hung around with his backpack in the shadows behind an adjacent building for much of the early night. The graffiti artist was tall and very thin, and he looked like he belonged in a black-and-white photograph somewhere, mostly because there was more shade about him than color. His skin was fatally pale, his hair and eyes darker than cacao. He wore dark form-fitting jeans and a black jacket and, absurdly, sunglasses, even though it was night. In this way, in his visual shadiness, he made a terrific loiterer, as he blended in almost seamlessly with the shadows./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He watched the bands trickle steadily out the back door of the music club, watched them mingle with their audiences and then filter away. Maintenance people and managers wandered in and out but mostly out, smoking cigarettes, heading toward their cars. The graffiti artist was unzipping his backpack and was about to start when the door opened one last time and three more guys came out, all talking, one of them carrying a guitar. They spoke in odd accents, British accents. It took the graffiti artist a moment to realize why that was so peculiar – the bans on immigration. No one left America anymore, and no one from other countries came, at least not in the few years that had passed since the ban. Accents were sifting away, a little more with every year./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"They headed around toward the front of the club in the alley between the two buildings, and in doing so they passed directly by the graffiti artist, mere feet away from the shadow in which he sat, motionless as a statue, with his backpack. He could have reached out and touched them. He didn't flinch or shrink away, knew they wouldn't see him. He was practically a shadow himself after all this time./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""It's a clever name," one of them was saying as they came closer. His voice was airy, almost like chalk. He had a long nose and almond-shaped eyes, and shadows had been cast over his face and through his hair in the darkness. "I wish I'd thought of it."/p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""Next time, John," said one of the others. "You'll get your chance to be clever, I'm sure of it."/p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""Well, thanks, George. Means a lot."/p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"They walked by the graffiti artist then, straight past him. The third started to say something else as they went, but the graffiti artist didn't notice what it was because at that very moment John glanced straight in his direction and their eyes locked. John didn't seem surprised to see him there, didn't seem curious about the loiterer or his backpack, didn't say anything to the others. He winked at the graffiti artist, tipping his head at him in a friendly silent greeting, and then all three of them were gone./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"The graffiti artist hadn't known how to respond to John, but luckily he was wearing the sunglasses, which sort of shielded him from having to respond anyway. He waited half an hour to make sure the police weren't coming, and in that span of time nobody entered the club and no one came out./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He checked his watch, dug the spray paint out of his backpack, and went to work./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"The mural took him all night. He worked steadily, for hours, breaking concentration only to grab more spray paint from his bag or to hide from people walking nearby, but gradually it began to take shape. He had never done one this big before and it felt like an exhibition, a declaration. By dawn his limbs were aching, but he had a complete image, a portrait, and there wasn't a square inch of the wall that wasn't marked with paint. He stepped back in a daze until he felt the grafted brick of the adjacent building and looked at his new wall, fingertips stained with color, an empty spray can dangling at his side. The mural was of a girl in a green jacket, a little younger than him, wild hair furling out around her, cold eyes boring down upon the back alleys of the city, index cards twisting away from her hands./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He left his signature, S.S., in the corner. Then he snatched up his backpack again and was gone./p 


End file.
